CHANGES.rst

1.2 (unreleased)

New Features

• astropy.analytic_functions
• astropy.config
• astropy.conftest.py
• astropy.constants
• astropy.convolution
• astropy.coordinates
• astropy.cosmology
• astropy.io.ascii
• astropy.io.fits
• astropy.io.misc
• astropy.io.votable
• astropy.logger.py
• astropy.modeling
• astropy.nddata
  • Added UnknownUncertainty as NDUncertainty subclass which cannot be used for error propagation. [#4272]
  • StdDevUncertainty implements error propagation using it's unit and a given correlation between the datasets. [#4272]
  • NDArithmeticMixin allows for arithmetic operations with anything that can be wrapped by the class. [#4272]
  • NDArithmeticMixin provides methods for arithmetic operations where the first operand is not an NDArithmeticMixin subclass via classmethods called ic_add, ic_subtract, etc. [#4272]
• astropy.stats
  • Added jackknife resampling method. [#3708]
  • Updated bootstrap to allow bootstrapping statistics with multiple outputs. [#3601]
• astropy.table
  • Table.show_in_notebook and Table.show_in_browser(jsviewer=True) now yield tables with an "idx" column, allowing easy identification of the index of a row even when the table is re-sorted in the browser. [#4404]
• astropy.tests
• astropy.time
  • Added caching of scale and format transformations for improved performance. [#4422]
• astropy.units
  • The option to use tuples to indicate fractional powers of units, deprecated in 0.3.1, has been removed. [#4449]
• astropy.utils
  • Implemented a generic and extensible way of merging metadata. [#4459]
  • Added format_doc decorator which allows to replace and/or format the current docstring of an object. [#4242]
• astropy.visualization
• astropy.vo
• astropy.wcs
  • wcslib was updated to v5.14 [#4579]

API changes

• astropy.analytic_functions
• astropy.config
  • The deprecated ConfigurationItem and ConfigAlias classes and the save_config, get_config_items, and generate_all_config_items functions have now been removed. [#2767, #4446]
• astropy.conftest.py
• astropy.constants
• astropy.convolution
• astropy.coordinates
  • Removed compatibility layer for pre-v0.4 API. [#4447]
• astropy.cosmology
• astropy.io.ascii
• astropy.io.fits
• astropy.io.misc
• astropy.io.votable
• astropy.logger.py
• astropy.modeling
• astropy.nddata
  • NDData: added an optional parameter copy which is False by default. If it is True all other parameters are copied before saving them as attributes. If False the parameters are only copied if there is no way of saving them as reference. [#4270]
  • NDData: Masked_Quantity objects are allowed as data parameter. [#4270]
  • NDUncertainty: Added array, unit and copy as optional parameters. [#4272]
  • NDUncertainty: Public methods propagate_add, etc. are replaced by a general propagate method. [#4272]
  • StdDevUncertainty: added an optional parameter copy which is False by default. [#4272]
  • NDArithmeticMixin: Added handle_mask, handle_meta and compare_wcs and uncertainty_correlation as optional parameters. [#4272]
  • NDArithmeticMixin: The optional propagate_uncertainties parameter can also be None. [#4272]
  • NDArithmeticMixin: Does not compare the wcs for equality except if compare_wcs is given as function that compares it. [#4272]
• astropy.stats
• astropy.table
• astropy.tests
• astropy.time
• astropy.units
  • Remove deprecated register argument for Unit classes. [#4448]
• astropy.utils
  • The astropy.utils.compat.argparse module has now been deprecated. Use the Python 'argparse' module directly instead. [#4462]
  • The astropy.utils.compat.odict module has now been deprecated. Use the Python 'collections' module directly instead. [#4466]
  • The astropy.utils.compat.gzip module has now been deprecated. Use the Python 'gzip' module directly instead. [#4464]
  • The deprecated ScienceStateAlias class has been removed. [#2767, #4446]
  • The astropy.utils.compat.subprocess module has now been deprecated. Use the Python 'subprocess' module instead. [#4483]
• astropy.visualization
• astropy.vo
• astropy.wcs

Bug fixes

• astropy.analytic_functions
• astropy.config
• astropy.conftest.py
• astropy.constants
• astropy.convolution
• astropy.coordinates
• astropy.cosmology
• astropy.io.ascii
• astropy.io.fits
• astropy.io.misc
• astropy.io.votable
• astropy.logger.py
• astropy.modeling
• astropy.nddata
  • NDDataBase does not implement a setter or getter for uncertainty, which is now an abstractproperty. [#4270]
  • NDData wraps the uncertainty inside an UnknownUncertainty if no uncertainty_type attribute is present in the uncertainty instead of raising an Exception. [#4270]
  • NDData The uncertainty_type of the uncertainty is no longer required to be a string, but it is still recommended. [#4270]
  • NDData now sets the parent_nddata of the uncertainty if the uncertainty is NDUncertainty-like. [#4152, #4270]
  • NDArithmeticMixin does provide correct resulting uncertainties for divide and multiply if only one uncertainty was set. [#4152, #4272]

• astropy.stats

• astropy.table
• astropy.tests
• astropy.time
• astropy.units
• astropy.utils
  • The astropy.utils.compat.fractions module has now been deprecated. Use the Python 'fractions' module directly instead. [#4463]
  • Added format_doc decorator which allows to replace and/or format the current docstring of an object. [#4242]
• astropy.visualization
• astropy.vo
  • Relaxed expected accuracy of Cone Search prediction test to reduce spurious failures. [#4382]
• astropy.wcs

Other Changes and Additions

• Python 2.6 is no longer supported. [#4486]

1.1.2 (unreleased)

New Features

• astropy.config
• astropy.constants
• astropy.convolution
• astropy.coordinates
• astropy.cosmology
• astropy.io.ascii
• astropy.io.fits
• astropy.io.misc
• astropy.io.registry
• astropy.io.votable
• astropy.modeling
• astropy.nddata
• astropy.stats
• astropy.sphinx
• astropy.table
• astropy.time
• astropy.units
• astropy.utils
• astropy.vo
• astropy.wcs

API Changes

• astropy.config
• astropy.constants
• astropy.convolution
• astropy.coordinates
• astropy.cosmology
• astropy.io.ascii
• astropy.io.fits
• astropy.io.misc
• astropy.io.registry
• astropy.io.votable
• astropy.modeling
• astropy.nddata
• astropy.stats
• astropy.table
• astropy.time
• astropy.units
• astropy.utils
• astropy.vo
• astropy.wcs

Bug Fixes

• astropy.config
• astropy.constants
• astropy.convolution
• astropy.coordinates
• astropy.cosmology
• astropy.io.ascii
  • Fixed handling of CDS data file when no description is given and also included stripping out of markup for missing value from description. [#4437]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Fixed possible segfault during error handling in FITS tile compression. [#4489]
  • Fixed crash on pickling of binary table columns with the 'X', 'P', or 'Q' format. [#4514]
  • Fixed memory / reference leak that could occur when copying a FITS_rec object (the .data for table HDUs). [#520]
  • Fixed a memory / reference leak in FITS_rec that occurred in a wide range of cases, especially after writing FITS tables to a file, but in other cases as well. [#4539]
• astropy.io.misc
• astropy.io.registry
• astropy.io.votable
• astropy.modeling
• astropy.nddata
• astropy.stats
• astropy.table
  • Fixed bug when replacing a table column with a mixin column like Quantity or Time. [#4601]
• astropy.time
• astropy.units
  • Fixed sphinx issues on plotting quantites. [#4527]
• astropy.utils
• astropy.visualization
  • Fixed fits2bitmap script to allow ext flag to contain extension names or numbers. [#4468]
  • Fixed fits2bitmap default output filename generation for compressed FITS files. [#4468]
• astropy.vo
• astropy.wcs
  • Fixed possible exception in handling of SIP headers that was introduced in v1.1.1. [#4492]
  • Fixed an issue with precision output by setting the default precision to 14 significant figures. [#4616]

Other Changes and Additions

• Nothing changed yet.

1.1.1 (2016-01-08)

New Features

• astropy.io.registry
  • Allow pathlib.Path objects (available in Python 3.4 and later) for specifying the file name in registry read / write functions. [#4405]
• astropy.utils
  • console.human_file_size now accepts quantities with byte-equivalent units [#4373]

Bug Fixes

• astropy.analytic_functions
  • Fixed the blackbody functions' handling of overflows on some platforms (Windows with MSVC, older Linux versions) with a buggy expm1 function. [#4393]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Fixed an bug where updates to string columns in FITS tables were not saved on Python 3. [#4452]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled astropy-helpers to v1.1.1. [#4413]

1.1 (2015-12-11)

New Features

• astropy.config

  • Added new tools set_temp_config and set_temp_cache which can be used either as function decorators or context managers to temporarily use alternative directories in which to read/write the Astropy config files and download caches respectively. This is especially useful for testing, though set_temp_cache may also be used as a way to provide an alternative (application specific) download cache for large data files, rather than relying on the default cache location in users' home directories. [#3975]

• astropy.constants

  • Added the Thomson scattering cross-section. [#3839]

• astropy.convolution

  • Added Moffat2DKernel. [#3965]

• astropy.coordinates

  • Added get_constellation function and SkyCoord.get_constellation convenience method to determine the constellation that a coordinate is in. [#3758]
  • Added PrecessedGeocentric frame, which is based on GCRS, but precessed to a specific requested mean equinox. [#3758]
  • Added Supergalactic frame to support de Vaucouleurs supergalactic coordinates. [#3892]
  • SphericalRepresentation now has a ._unit_representation class attribute to specify an equivalent UnitSphericalRepresentation. This allows subclasses of representations to pair up correctly. [#3757]
  • Added functionality to support getting the locations of observatories by name. See astropy.coordinates.EarthLocation.of_site. [#4042]
  • Added ecliptic coordinates, including GeocentricTrueEcliptic, BarycentricTrueEcliptic, and HeliocentricTrueEcliptic. [#3749]

• astropy.cosmology

  • Add Planck 2015 cosmology [#3476]
  • Distance calculations now > 20-40x faster for the supplied cosmologies due to implementing Cython scalar versions of FLRW.inv_efunc.[#4127]

• astropy.io.ascii

  • Automatically use guess=False when reading if the file format is provided and the format parameters are uniquely specified. This update also removes duplicate format guesses to improve performance. [#3418]
  • Calls to ascii.read() for fixed-width tables may now omit one of the keyword arguments col_starts or col_ends. Columns will be assumed to begin and end immediately adjacent to each other. [#3657]
  • Add a function get_read_trace() that returns a traceback of the attempted read formats for the last call to astropy.io.ascii.read. [#3688]
  • Supports LZMA decompression via get_readable_fileobj [#3667]
  • Allow - character is Sextractor format column names. [#4168]
  • Improve DAOphot reader to read multi-aperture files [#3535, #4207]

• astropy.io.fits

  • Support reading and writing from bzip2 compressed files. i.e. .fits.bz2 files. [#3789]
  • Included a new command-line script called fitsinfo to display a summary of the HDUs in one or more FITS files. [#3677]

• astropy.io.misc

  • Support saving all meta information, description and units of tables and columns in HDF5 files [#4103]

• astropy.io.votable

  • A new method was added to astropy.io.votable.VOTable, get_info_by_id to conveniently find an INFO element by its ID attribute. [#3633]
  • Instances in the votable tree now have better __repr__ methods. [#3639]

• astropy.logger.py

  • Added log levels (e.g., DEBUG, INFO, CRITICAL) to astropy.log [#3947]

• astropy.modeling

  • Added a new Parameter.validator interface for setting a validation method on individual model parameters. See the Parameter documentation for more details. [#3910]
  • The projection classes that are named based on the 3-letter FITS WCS projections (e.g. Pix2Sky_TAN) now have aliases using longer, more descriptive names (e.g. Pix2Sky_Gnomonic). [#3583]
  • All of the standard FITS WCS projection types have been implemented in astropy.modeling.projections (by wrapping WCSLIB). [#3906]
  • Added Sersic1D and Sersic2D model classes. [#3889]
  • Added the Voigt profile to existing models. [#3901]
  • Added bounding_box property and render_model function [#3909]

• astropy.nddata

  • Added block_reduce and block_replicate functions. [#3453]
  • extract_array now offers different options to deal with array boundaries [#3727]
  • Added a new Cutout2D class to create postage stamp image cutouts with optional WCS propagation. [#3823]

• astropy.stats

  • Added sigma_lower and sigma_upper keywords to sigma_clip to allow for unsymmetric clipping. [#3595]
  • Added cenfunc, stdfunc, and axis keywords to sigma_clipped_stats. [#3792]
  • sigma_clip automatically masks invalid input values (NaNs, Infs) before performing the clipping [#4051]
  • Added the histogram routine, which is similar to np.histogram but includes several additional options for automatic determination of optimal histogram bins. Associated helper routines include bayesian_blocks, friedman_bin_width, scott_bin_width, and knuth_bin_width. This functionality was ported from the astroML library. [#3756]
  • Added the bayesian_blocks routine, which implements a dynamic algorithm for locating change-points in various time series. [#3756]
  • A new function poisson_conf_interval() was added to allow easy calculation of several standard formulae for the error bars on the mean of a Poisson variable estimated from a single sample.

• astropy.table

  • add_column() and add_columns() now have rename_duplicate option to rename new column(s) rather than raise exception when its name already exists. [#3592]
  • Added Table.to_pandas and Table.from_pandas for converting to/from pandas dataframes. [#3504]
  • Initializing a Table with Column objects no longer requires that the column name attribute be defined. [#3781]
  • Added an info property to Table objects which provides configurable summary information about the table and its columns. [#3731]
  • Added an info property to column classes (Column or mixins). This serves a dual function of providing configurable summary information about the column, and acting as a manager of column attributes such as name, format, or description. [#3731]
  • Updated table and column representation to use the dtype_info_name function for the dtype value. Removed the default "masked=False" from the table representation. [#3868, #3869]
  • Updated row representation to be consistent with the corresponding table representation for that row. Added HTML representation so a row displays nicely in IPython notebook.
  • Added a new table indexing engine allowing for the creation of indices on one or more columns of a table using add_index. These indices enable new functionality such as searching for rows by value using loc and iloc, as well as increased performance for certain operations. [#3915]
  • Added capability to include a structured array or recarray in a table as a mixin column. This allows for an approximation of nested tables. [#3925]
  • Added keep_byteorder option to Table.as_array(). See the "API Changes" section below. [#4080]
  • Added a new method Table.replace_column() to replace an existing column with a new data column. [#4090]
  • Added a tableclass option to Table.pformat() to allow specifying a list of CSS classes added to the HTML table. [#4131]
  • New CSS for jsviewer table [#2917, #2982, #4174]
  • Added a new Table.show_in_notebook method that shows an interactive view of a Table (similar to Table.show_in_browser(jsviewer=True)) in an Python/Jupyter notebook. [#4197]

• astropy.tests

  • Added new test config options, config_dir and cache_dir (these can be edited in setup.cfg or as extra command-line options to py.test) for setting the locations to use for the Astropy config files and download caches (see also the related set_temp_config/cache features added in astropy.config). [#3975]

• astropy.time

  • Add support for FITS standard time strings. [#3547]
  • Allow the format attribute to be updated in place to change the default representation of a Time object. [#3673]
  • Add support for shape manipulation (reshape, ravel, etc.). [#3224]
  • Add argmin, argmax, argsort, min, max, ptp, sort methods. [#3581]
  • Add Time.to_datetime method for converting Time objects to timezone-aware datetimes. [#4119]

• astropy.units

  • Added furlong to imperial units. [#3529]
  • Added mil to imperial units. [#3716]
  • Added stone to imperial units. [#4192]
  • Added Earth Mass (M_earth) and Jupiter mass (M_jup) to units [#3907]
  • Added support for functional units, in particular the logarithmic ones Magnitude, Decibel, and Dex. [#1894]
  • Quantities now work with the unit support in matplotlib. See :ref:`plotting-quantities`. [#3981]

• astropy.utils

  • Added new OrderedDescriptor and OrderedDescriptorContainer utility classes that make it easier to implement classes with declarative APIs, wherein class-level attributes have an inherit "ordering" to them that is specified by the order in which those attributes are defined in the class declaration (by defining them using special descriptors that have OrderedDescriptor as a base class). See the API documentation for these classes for more details. Coordinate frames and models now use this interface. [#3679]
  • The get_pkg_data_* functions now take an optional package argument which allows specifying any package to read package data filenames or content out of, as opposed to only being able to use data from the package that the function is called from. [#4079]
  • Added function dtype_info_name to the data_info module to provide the name of a dtype for human-readable informational purposes. [#3868]
  • Added classproperty decorator--this is to property as classmethod is to normal instance methods. [#3982]
  • iers.open now handles network URLs, as well as local paths. [#3850]
  • The astropy.utils.wraps decorator now takes an optional exclude_args argument not shared by the standard library wraps decorator (as it is unique to the Astropy version's ability of copying the wrapped function's argument signature). exclude_args allows certain arguments on the wrapped function to be excluded from the signature of the wrapper function. This is particularly useful when wrapping an instance method as a function (to exclude the self argument). [#4017]
  • get_readable_fileobj can automatically decompress LZMA ('.xz') files using the lzma module of Python 3.3+ or, when available, the backports.lzma package on earlier versions. [#3667]
  • The resolve_name utility now accepts any number of additional positional arguments that are automatically dotted together with the first name argument. [#4083]
  • Added is_url_in_cache for resolving paths to cached files via URLS and checking if files exist. [#4095]
  • Added a step argument to the ProgressBar.map method to give users control over the update frequency of the progress bar. [#4191]

• astropy.visualization

  • Added a function / context manager quantity_support for enabling seamless ploting of Quantity instances in matplotlib. [#3981]
  • Added the hist function, which is similar to plt.hist but includes several additional options for automatic determination of optimal histogram bins. This functionality was ported from the astroML library. [#3756]

• astropy.wcs

  • The included version of wcslib has been upgraded to 5.10. [#4239]

    The minimum required version of wcslib in the 4.x series remains 4.24.

    The minimum required version of wcslib in the 5.x series is 5.8. Building astropy against a wcslib 5.x prior to 5.8 will raise an ImportError when astropy.wcs is imported.

    The wcslib changes relevant to astropy are:

    • The FITS headers returned by astropy.wcs.WCS.to_header and astropy.wcs.WCS.to_header_string now include values with more precision. This will result in numerical differences in your results if you convert astropy.wcs.WCS objects to FITS headers and use the results.
    • astropy.wcs.WCS now recognises the TPV, TPD, TPU, DSS, TNX and ZPX polynomial distortions.
    • Added relaxation flags to allow PC0i_0ja, PV0j_0ma, and PS0j_0ma (i.e. with leading zeroes on the index).
    • Tidied up error reporting, particularly relating to translating status returns from lower-level functions.
    • Changed output formatting of floating point values in to_header.

  • Enhanced text representation of WCS objects. [#3604]

• The astropy.tests.helper module is now part of the public API (and has a documentation page). This module was in previous releases of astropy, but was not considered part of the public API until now. [#3890]

• There is a new function astropy.online_help to search the astropy documentation and display the result in a web browser. [#3642]

API changes

• astropy.cosmology
  • FLRW._tfunc and FLRW._xfunc are marked as deprecated. Users should use the new public interfaces FLRW.lookback_time_integrand and FLRW.abs_distance_integrand instead. [#3767]
• astropy.io.ascii
  • The default header line processing was made to be consistent with data line processing in that it now ignores blank lines that may have whitespace characters. Any code that explicitly specifies a header_start value for parsing a file with blank lines in the header containing whitespace will need to be updated. [#2654]
  • Check that columns in formats specifier exist in the output table when writing. [#4508]
• astropy.io.fits
  • The uint argument to fits.open is now True by default; that is, arrays using the FITS unsigned integer convention will be detected, and read as unsigned integers by default. A new config option for io.fits, enable_uint, can be changed to False to revert to the original behavior of ignoring the uint convention unless it is explicitly requested with uint=True. [#3916]
  • The ImageHDU.NumCode and ImageHDU.ImgCode attributes (and same for other classes derived from _ImageBaseHDU) are deprecated. Instead, the astropy.io.fits module-level constants BITPIX2DTYPE and DTYPE2BITPIX can be used. [#3916]
• astropy.modeling
  • Note: Comparisons of model parameters with array-like values now yields a Numpy boolean array as one would get with normal Numpy array comparison. Previously this returned a scalar True or False, with True only if the comparison was true for all elements compared, which could lead to confusing circumstances. [#3912]
  • Using model.inverse = None to reset a model's inverse to its default is deprecated. In the future this syntax will explicitly make a model not have an inverse (even if it has a default). Instead, use del model.inverse to reset a model's inverse to its default (if it has a default, otherwise this just deletes any custom inverse that has been assigned to the model and is still equivalent to setting model.inverse = None). [#4236]
  • Adds a model.has_user_inverse attribute which indicates whether or not a user has assigned a custom inverse to model.inverse. This is just for informational purposes, for example, for software that introspects model objects. [#4236]
  • Renamed the parameters of RotateNative2Celestial and RotateCelestial2Native from phi, theta, psi to lon, lat and lon_pole. [#3578]
  • Deprecated the Pix2Sky_AZP.check_mu and Sky2Pix_AZP.check_mu methods (these were obscure "accidentally public" methods that were probably not used by anyone). [#3910]
  • Added a phase parameter to the Sine1D model. [#3807]
• astropy.stats
  • Renamed the sigma_clip sig keyword as sigma. [#3595]
  • Changed the sigma_clip varfunc keyword to stdfunc. [#3595]
  • Renamed the sigma_clipped_stats mask_val keyword to mask_value. [#3595]
  • Changed the default iters keyword value to 5 in both the sigma_clip and sigma_clipped_stats functions. [#4067]
• astropy.table
  • Table.as_array() always returns a structured array with each column in the system's native byte order. The optional keep_byteorder=True option will keep each column's data in its original byteorder. [#4080]
  • Table.simple_table() now creates tables with int64 and float64 types instead of int32 and float64. [#4114]
• astropy.time
  • The astropy_time attribute and time format has been removed from the public interface. Existing code that instantiates a new time object using format='astropy_time' can simply omit the format specification. [#3857]
• astropy.units
  • Single-item Quantity instances with record dtype will now have their isscalar property return True, consistent with behaviour for numpy arrays, where np.void records are considered scalar. [#3899]
  • Three changes relating to the FITS unit format [#3993]:
    • The FITS unit format will no longer parse an arbitrary number as a scale value. It must be a power of 10 of the form 10^^k, 10^k, 10+k, 10-k and 10(k). [#3993]
    • Scales that are powers of 10 can be written out. Previously, any non-1.0 scale was rejected.
    • The * character is accepted as a separator between the scale and the units.
  • Unit formatter classes now require the parse and to_string methods are now required to be classmethods (and the formatter classes themselves are assumed to be singletons that are not instantiated). As unit formatters are mostly an internal implementation detail this is not likely to affect any users. [#4001]
  • CGS E&M units are now defined separately from SI E&M units, and have distinct physical types. [#4255]
• astropy.utils
  • All of the get_pkg_data_* functions take an optional package argument as their second positional argument. So any code that previously passed other arguments to these functions as positional arguments might break. Use keyword argument passing instead to mitigate this. [#4079]
  • astropy.utils.iers now uses a QTable internally, which means that the numerical columns are stored as Quantity, with full support for units. Furthermore, the ut1_utc method now returns a Quantity instead of a float or an array (as did pm_xy already). [#3223]
  • astropy.utils.iers now throws an IERSRangeError, a subclass of IndexError, rather than a raw IndexError. This allows more fine-grained catching of situations where a Time is beyond the range of the loaded IERS tables. [#4302]
• astropy.wcs
  • When compiled with wcslib 5.9 or later, the FITS headers returned by astropy.wcs.WCS.to_header and astropy.wcs.WCS.to_header_string now include values with more precision. This will result in numerical differences in your results if you convert astropy.wcs.WCS objects to FITS headers and use the results.
  • If NAXIS1 or NAXIS2 is not passed with the header object to WCS.calc_footprint, a ValueError is raised. [#3557]

Bug fixes

• astropy.constants
  • The constants Ry and u are now properly used inside the corresponding units. The latter have changed slightly as a result. [#4229]
• astropy.coordinates
  • Internally, coordinates now consistently uses the appropriate time scales for using ERFA functions. [#4302]
• astropy.io.ascii
  • Fix a segfault in the fast C parser when one of the column headers is empty [#3545].
  • Fix several bugs that prevented the fast readers from being used when guessing the file format. Also improved the read trace information to better understand format guessing. [#4115]
  • Fix an underlying problem that resulted in an uncaught TypeError exception when reading a CDS-format file with guessing enabled. [#4120]
• astropy.modeling
  • Simplex fitter now correctly passes additional keywords arguments to the scipy solver. [#3966]
  • The keyword acc (for accuracy) is now correctly accepted by Simplex. [#3966]
• astropy.units
  • The units Ryd and u are no longer hard-coded numbers, but depend on the appropriate values in the constants module. As a result, these units now imply slightly different conversions. [#4229]

Other Changes and Additions

• The ./setup.py test command is now implemented in the astropy.tests module again (previously its implementation had been moved into astropy-helpers). However, that made it difficult to synchronize changes to the Astropy test runner with changes to the ./setup.py test UI. astropy-helpers v1.1 and above will detect this implementation of the test command, when present, and use it instead of the old version that was included in astropy-helpers (most users will not notice any difference as a result of this change). [#4020]
• The repr for Table no longer displays masked=False since tables are not masked by default anyway. [#3869]
• The version of PLY that ships with astropy has been updated to 3.6.
• WCSAxes is now required for doc builds. [#4074]
• Updated astropy.tests test runner code to work with Coverage v4.0 when generating test coverage reports. [#4176]
• The migration guide from pre-v0.4 coordinates has been removed to avoid cluttering the astropy.coordinates documentation with increasingly irrelevant material. To see the migration guide, we recommend you simply look to the archived documentation for previous versions, e.g. http://docs.astropy.org/en/v1.0/coordinates/index.html#migrating-from-pre-v0-4-coordinates [#4203]
• In astropy.coordinates, the transformations between GCRS, CIRS, and ITRS have been adjusted to more logically reflect the order in which they actually apply. This should not affect most coordinate transformations, but may affect code that is especially sensitive to machine precision effects that change when the order in which transformations occur is changed. [#4255]

1.0.9 (unreleased)

New Features

• astropy.config
• astropy.constants
• astropy.convolution
• astropy.coordinates
• astropy.cosmology
• astropy.io.ascii
• astropy.io.fits
• astropy.io.misc
• astropy.io.registry
• astropy.io.votable
• astropy.modeling
• astropy.nddata

• NDArithmeticMixin check for matching WCS now works with

  astropy.wcs.WCS objects [#4499]

• astropy.stats
• astropy.sphinx
• astropy.table
• astropy.time
• astropy.units
• astropy.utils
• astropy.vo
• astropy.wcs

API Changes

• astropy.config
• astropy.constants
• astropy.convolution
• astropy.coordinates
• astropy.cosmology
• astropy.io.ascii
• astropy.io.fits
• astropy.io.misc
• astropy.io.registry
• astropy.io.votable
• astropy.modeling
• astropy.nddata
• astropy.stats
• astropy.table
• astropy.time
• astropy.units
• astropy.utils
• astropy.vo
• astropy.wcs

Bug Fixes

• astropy.config
• astropy.constants
• astropy.convolution
• astropy.coordinates
• astropy.cosmology
• astropy.io.ascii
  • Fixed addition of new line characters after last row of data in ascii.latex.AASTex. [#3888]
  • Fixed reading of Latex tables where the \tabular tag is in the first line. [#4595]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Fixed possible segfault during error handling in FITS tile compression. [#4489]
  • Fixed crash on pickling of binary table columns with the 'X', 'P', or 'Q' format. [#4514]
  • Fixed memory / reference leak that could occur when copying a FITS_rec object (the .data for table HDUs). [#520]
  • Fixed a memory / reference leak in FITS_rec that occurred in a wide range of cases, especially after writing FITS tables to a file, but in other cases as well. [#4539]
• astropy.io.misc
• astropy.io.registry
• astropy.io.votable
• astropy.modeling
  • Fixed display of compound model expressions and components when printing compound model instances. [#4414]
• astropy.nddata
• astropy.stats
• astropy.table
• astropy.time
• astropy.units
• astropy.utils
• astropy.vo
• astropy.visualization
  • Fixed fits2bitmap script to allow ext flag to contain extension names or numbers. [#4468]
  • Fixed fits2bitmap default output filename generation for compressed FITS files. [#4468]
• astropy.wcs

Other Changes and Additions

• Nothing changed yet.

1.0.8 (2016-01-08)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.io.fits
  • Fixed an bug where updates to string columns in FITS tables were not saved on Python 3. [#4452]
• astropy.units
  • In-place peak-to-peak calculations now work on Quantity. [#4442]
• astropy.utils
  • Fixed find_api_page to work correctly on python 3.x [#4378]

1.0.7 (2015-12-04)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.coordinates
  • Pickling of EarthLocation instances now also works on Python 2. [#4304]

astropy.io.ascii

• Fix fast writer so bytestring column output is not prefixed by 'b' in Python 3. [#4350]

• astropy.io.fits
  • Fixed a regression that could cause writes of large FITS files to be truncated. [#4307]
  • Astropy v1.0.6 included a fix (#4228) for an obscure case where the TDIM of a table column is smaller than the repeat count of its data format. This updates that fix in such a way that it works with Numpy 1.10 as well. [#4266]
• astropy.table
  • Fix a bug when pickling a Table with mixin columns (e.g. Time). [#4098]
• astropy.time
  • Fix incorrect value attribute for epoch formats like "unix" when scale is different from the class epoch_scale. [#4312]
• astropy.utils
  • Fixed an issue where if ipython is installed but ipykernel is not installed then importing astropy from the ipython console gave an IPython.kernel deprecation warning. [#4279]
  • Fixed crash that could occur in ProgressBar when astropy is imported in an IPython startup script. [#4274]

1.0.6 (2015-10-22)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.analytic_functions
  • Fixed blackbody analytic functions to properly support arrays of temperatures. [#4251]
• astropy.coordinates
  • Fixed errors in transformations for objects within a few AU of the Earth. Included substansive changes to transformation machinery that may change distances at levels ~machine precision for other objects. [#4254]
• astropy.io.fits
  • fitsdiff and related functions now do a better job reporting differences between values that are different types but have the same representation (ex: the string '0' versus the number 0). [#4122]
  • Miscellaneous fixes for supporting Numpy 1.10. [#4228]
  • Fixed an issue where writing a column of unicode strings to a FITS table resulted in a quadrupling of size of the column (i.e. the format of the FITS column was 4 characters for every one in the original strings). [#4228]
  • Added support for an obscure case (but nonetheless allowed by the FITS standard) where a column has some TDIMn keyword, but a repeat count in the TFORMn column greater than the number of elements implied by the TDIMn. For example TFORMn = 100I, but TDIMn = '(5,5)'. In this case the TDIMn implies 5x5 arrays in the column, but the TFORMn implies a 100 element 1-D array in the column. In this case the TDIM takes precedence, and the remaining bytes in the column are ignored. [#4228]
• astropy.io.votable
  • Fixed crash with Python compiler optimization level = 2. [#4231]
• astropy.vo
  • Fixed check_conesearch_sites with parallel=True on Python >= 3.3 and on Windows (it was broken in both those cases for separate reasons). [#2970]

Other Changes and Additions

• All tests now pass against Numpy v1.10.x. This implies nominal support for Numpy 1.10.x moving forward (but there may still be unknown issues). For example, there is already a known performance issue with tables containing large multi-dimensional columns--for example, tables that contain entire images in one or more of their columns. This is a known upstream issue in Numpy. [#4259]

1.0.5 (2015-10-05)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.constants
  • Rename units -> unit and error -> uncertainty in the repr and str of constants to match attribute names. [#4147]
• astropy.coordinates
  • Fix string representation of SkyCoord objects transformed into the AltAz frame [#4055]
  • Fix the search_around_sky function to allow storekdtree to be False as was intended. [#4082]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Fix bug when extending one header (without comments) with another (with comments). [#3967]
  • Somewhat improved resource usage for FITS data--previously a new mmap was opened for each HDU of a FITS file accessed through an HDUList. Each mmap used up a single file descriptor, causing problems with system resource limits for some users. Now only a single mmap is opened, and shared for the data of all HDUs. Note: The problem still persists with using the "convenience" functions. For example using fits.getdata will create one mmap per HDU read this way (as opposed to opening the file with fits.open and accessing the HDUs through the HDUList object). [#4097]
  • Fix bug where reading a file without a newline failed with an unrelated / unhelpful exception. [#4160]
• astropy.modeling
  • Cleaned up repr of models that have no parameters. [#4076]
• astropy.nddata
  • Initializing NDDataArray from another instance now sets flags as expected and no longer fails when uncertainty is set [#4129]. Initializing an NDData subclass from a parent instance (eg. NDDataArray from NDData) now sets the attributes other than data as it should [#4137].
• astropy.table
  • Fix bug when doing outer join on multi-dimensional columns. [#4060]
  • Fix an issue with setting fill value when column dtype is changed. [#4088]
  • Fix bug when unpickling a bare Column where the _parent_table attribute was not set. This impacted the Column representation. [#4099]
  • Fix issue with the web browser opening with an empty page, and ensure that the url is correctly formatted for Windows. [#4132]
  • Fix NameError in table stack exception message. [#4213]
• astropy.utils
  • resolve_name no longer causes sys.modules to be cluttered with additional copies of modules under a package imported like resolve_name('numpy'). [#4084]
  • console was updated to support IPython 4.x and Jupyter 1.x. This should suppress a ShimWarning that was appearing at import of astropy with IPython 4.0 or later. [#4078]
  • Temporary downloaded files created by get_readable_fileobj when passed a URL are now deleted immediately after the file is closed. [#4198]
• astropy.visualization
  • The color for axes labels was set to white. Since white labels on white background are hard to read, the label color has been changed to black. [#4143]
  • ImageNormalize now automatically determines vmin/vmax (via the autoscale_None method) when they have not been set explicitly. [#4117]
• astropy.vo
  • Cone Search validation no longer crashes when the provider gives an incomplete test query. It also ensures search radius for a test query is not too large to avoid timeout. [#4158, #4159]

Other Changes and Additions

• Astropy now supports Python 3.5. [#4027]
• Updated tests to support py.test 2.7, and upgraded the bundled copy of py.test to v2.7.3. [#4027]

1.0.4 (2015-08-11)

New Features

• astropy.convolution
  • Modified Cython functions to release the GIL. This enables convolution to be parallelized effectively and gives large speedups when used with multithreaded task schedulers such as Dask. [#3949]

API Changes

• astropy.coordinates
  • Some transformations for an input coordinate that's a scalar now correctly return a scalar. This was always the intended behavior, but it may break code that has been written to work-around this bug, so it may be viewed as an unplanned API change [#3920]
• astropy.visualization
  • The astropy_mpl_style no longer sets interactive to True, but instead leaves it at the user preference. This makes using the style compatible with building docs with Sphinx, and other non-interactive contexts. [#4030]

Bug Fixes

• astropy.coordinates
  • Fix bug where coordinate representation setting gets reset to default value when coordinate array is indexed or sliced. [#3824]
  • Fixed confusing warning message shown when using dates outside current IERS data. [#3844]
  • get_sun now yields a scalar when the input time is a scalar (this was a regression in v1.0.3 from v1.0.2) [#3998]
  • Fixed bug where some scalar coordinates were incorrectly being changed to length-1 array coordinates after transforming through certain frames. [#3920]
  • Fixed bug causing the separation methods of SkyCoord and frame classes to fail due to infinite recursion [#4033]
  • Made it so that passing in a list of SkyCoord objects that are in UnitSphericalRepresentation to the SkyCoord constructor appropriately yields a new object in UnitSphericalRepresentation [#3938]
• astropy.cosmology
  • Fixed wCDM to not ignore the Ob0 parameter on initialization. [#3934]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Fixed crash when updating data in a random groups HDU opened in update mode. [#3730]
  • Fixed incorrect checksum / datasum being written when re-writing a scaled HDU (i.e. non-trivial BSCALE and/or BZERO) with do_not_scale_image_data=False. [#3883]
  • Fixed stray deprecation warning in BinTableHDU.copy(). [#3789]
  • Better handling of the BLANK keyword when auto-scaling scaled image data. The BLANK keyword is now removed from the header after auto-scaling is applied, and it is restored properly (with floating point NaNs replaced by the filler value) when updating a file opened with the scale_back=True argument. Invalid usage of the BLANK keyword is also better warned about during validation. [#3865]
  • Reading memmaped scaled images won't fail when do_not_scale_image_data=True (that is, since we're just reading the raw / physical data there is no reason mmap can't be used). [#3766]
  • Fixed a reference cycle that could sometimes cause FITS table-related objects (BinTableHDU, ColDefs, etc.) to hang around in memory longer than expected. [#4012]
• astropy.modeling
  • Improved support for pickling of compound models, including both compound model instances, and new compound model classes. [#3867]
  • Added missing default values for Ellipse2D parameters. [#3903]
• astropy.time
  • Fixed iteration of scalar Time objects so that iter() correctly raises a TypeError on them (while still allowing Time arrays to be iterated). [#4048]
• astropy.units
  • Added frequency-equivalency check when declaring doppler equivalencies [#3728]
  • Define floor_divide (//) for Quantity to be consistent divmod, such that it only works where the quotient is dimensionless. This guarantees that (q1 // q2) * q2 + (q1 % q2) == q1. [#3817]
  • Fixed the documentation of supported units to correctly report support for SI prefixes. Previously the table of supported units incorrectly showed several derived unit as not supporting prefixes, when in fact they do. [#3835]
  • Fix a crash when calling astropy.units.cds.enable(). This will now "set" rather than "add" units to the active set to avoid the namespace clash with the default units. [#3873]
  • Ensure in-place operations on float32 quantities work. [#4007]
• astropy.utils
  • The deprecated decorator did not correctly wrap classes that have a custom metaclass--the metaclass could be dropped from the deprecated version of the class. [#3997]
  • The wraps decorator would copy the wrapped function's name to the wrapper function even when '__name__' is excluded from the assigned argument. [#4016]
• Misc
  • fitscheck no longer causes scaled image data to be rescaled when adding checksums to existing files. [#3884]
  • Fixed an issue where running import astropy from within the source tree did not automatically build the extension modules if the source is from a source distribution (as opposed to a git repository). [#3932]
  • Fixed multiple instances of a bug that prevented Astropy from being used when compiled with the python -OO flag, due to it causing all docstrings to be stripped out. [#3923]
  • Removed source code template files that were being installed accidentally alongside installed Python modules. [#4014]
  • Fixed a bug in the exception logging that caused a crash in the exception handler itself on Python 3 when exceptions do not include a message. [#4056]

1.0.3 (2015-06-05)

New Features

• astropy.table
  • Greatly improved the speed of printing a large table to the screen when only a few rows are being displayed. [#3796]
• astropy.time
  • Add support for the 2015-Jun-30 leap second. [#3794]

API Changes

• astropy.io.ascii
  • Note that HTML formatted tables will not always be found with guess mode unless it passes certain heuristics that strongly suggest the presence of HTML in the input. Code that expects to read tables from HTML should specify format='html' explicitly. See bug fixes below for more details. [#3693]

Bug Fixes

• astropy.convolution
  • Fix issue with repeated normalizations of Kernels. [#3747]
• astropy.coordinates
  • Fixed get_sun to yield frames with the obstime set to what's passed into the function (previously it incorrectly always had J2000). [#3750]
  • Fixed get_sun to account for aberration of light. [#3750]
  • Fixed error in the GCRS->ICRS transformation that gave incorrect distances. [#3750]
• astropy.io.ascii
  • Remove HTML from the list of automatically-guessed formats when reading if the file does not appear to be HTML. This was necessary to avoid a commonly-encountered segmentation fault occurring in the libxml parser on MacOSX. [#3693]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Fixes to support the upcoming Numpy 1.10. [#3419]
• astropy.modeling
  • Polynomials are now scaled when used in a compound model. [#3702]
  • Fixed the Ellipse2D model to be consistent with Disk2D in how pixels are included. [#3736]
  • Fixed crash when evaluating a model that accepts no inputs. [#3772]
• astropy.testing
  • The Astropy py.test plugins that disable unintentional internet access in tests were also blocking use of local UNIX sockets in tests, which prevented testing some multiprocessing code--fixed. [#3713]
• astropy.units
  • Supported full SI prefixes for the barn unit ("picobarn", "femtobarn", etc.) [#3753]
  • Fix loss of precision when multiplying non-whole-numbered powers of units together. For example, before this change, (u.m ** 1.5) ** Fraction(4, 5) resulted in an inaccurate floating-point power of 1.2000000000000002. After this change, the exact rational number of Fraction(6, 5) is maintained. [#3790]
  • Fixed printing of object ndarrays containing multiple Quantity objects with differing / incompatible units. Note: Unit conversion errors now cause a UnitConversionError exception to be raised. However, this is a subclass of the UnitsError exception used previously, so existing code that catches UnitsError should still work. [#3778]

Other Changes and Additions

• Added a new astropy.__bibtex__ attribute which gives a citation for Astropy in bibtex format. [#3697]
• The bundled version of ERFA was updated to v1.2.0 to address leapsecond updates. [#3802]

0.4.6 (2015-05-29)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.time

  • Fixed ERFA code to handle the 2015-Jun-30 leap second. [#3795]

1.0.2 (2015-04-16)

New Features

• astropy.modeling
  • Added support for polynomials with degree 0 or degree greater than 15. [#3574, 3589]

Bug Fixes

• astropy.config
  • The pre-astropy-0.4 configuration API has been fixed. It was inadvertently broken in 1.0.1. [#3627]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Fixed a severe memory leak that occurred when reading tile compressed images. [#3680]
  • Fixed bug where column data could be unintentionally byte-swapped when copying data from an existing FITS file to a new FITS table with a TDIMn keyword for that column. [#3561]
  • The ColDefs.change_attrib, ColDefs.change_name, and ColDefs.change_unit methods now work as advertised. It is also possible (and preferable) to update attributes directly on Column objects (for example setting column.name), and the change will be accurately reflected in any associated table data and its FITS header. [#3283, #1539, #2618]
  • Fixes an issue with the FITS_rec interface to FITS table data, where a FITS_rec created by copying an existing FITS table but adding new rows could not be sliced or masked correctly. [#3641]
  • Fixed handling of BINTABLE with TDIMn of size 1. [#3580]
• astropy.io.votable
  • Loading a TABLE element without any DATA now correctly creates a 0-row array. [#3636]
• astropy.modeling
  • Added workaround to support inverses on compound models when one of the sub-models is itself a compound model with a manually-assigned custom inverse. [#3542]
  • Fixed instantiation of polynomial models with constraints for parameters (constraints could still be assigned after instantiation, but not during). [#3606]
  • Fixed fitting of 2D polynomial models with the LeVMarLSQFitter. [#3606]
• astropy.table
  • Ensure QTable can be pickled [#3590]
  • Some corner cases when instantiating an astropy.table.Table with a Numpy array are handled [#3637]. Notably:
    • a zero-length array is the same as passing None
    • a scalar raises a ValueError
    • a one-dimensional array is treated as a single row of a table.
  • Ensure a Column without units is treated as an array, not as an dimensionless Quantity. [#3648]
• astropy.units
  • Ensure equivalencies that do more than just scale a Quantity are properly handled also in ufunc evaluations. [#2496, #3586]
  • The LaTeX representation of the Angstrom unit has changed from \overset{\circ}{A} to \mathring{A}, which should have better support across regular LaTeX, MathJax and matplotlib (as of version 1.5) [#3617]
• astropy.vo
  • Using HTTPS/SSL for communication between SAMP hubs now works correctly on all supported versions of Python [#3613]
• astropy.wcs
  • When no relax argument is passed to WCS.to_header() and the result omits non-standard WCS keywords, a warning is emitted. [#3652]

Other Changes and Additions

• astropy.units
  • Clarified imperial mass measurements and added pound force (lbf), kilopound (kip), and pound per square inch (psi). [#3409]
• astropy.vo
  • The number of retries for connections in astropy.vo.samp can now be configured by a n_retries configuration option. [#3612]
• Testing
  • Running astropy.test() from within the IPython prompt has been provisionally re-enabled. [#3184]

1.0.1 (2015-03-06)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.constants
  • Ensure constants can be turned into Quantity safely. [#3537, #3538]
• astropy.io.ascii
  • Fix a segfault in the fast C parser when one of the column headers is empty [#3545].
  • Fixed support for reading inf and nan values with the fast reader in Windows. Also fixed in the case of using use_fast_converter=True with the fast reader. [#3525]
  • Fixed use of mmap in the fast reader on Windows. [#3525]
  • Fixed issue where commented header would treat comments defining the table (i.e. column headers) as purely information comments, leading to problems when trying to round-trip the table. [#3562]
• astropy.modeling
  • Fixed propagation of parameter constraints ('fixed', 'bounds', 'tied') between compound models and their components. There is may still be some difficulty defining 'tied' constraints properly for use with compound models, however. [#3481]
• astropy.nddata
  • Restore several properties to the compatibility class NDDataArray that were inadvertently omitted [#3466].
• astropy.time
  • Time objects now always evaluate to True, except when empty. [#3530]

Miscellaneous

• astropy._erfa
  • The ERFA wrappers are now written directly in the Python/C API rather than using Cython, for greater performance. [#3521]
• Miscellaneous
  • Improve import time of astropy [#3488].

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled astropy-helpers version to v1.0.1 to address installation issues with some packages that depend on Astropy. [#3541]

1.0 (2015-02-18)

General

Astropy now requires a Numpy 1.6.0 or later.

New Features

• astropy.analytic_functions
  • The astropy.analytic_functions was added to contain analytic functions useful for astronomy [#3077].
• astropy.coordinates
  • astropy.coordinates now has a full stack of frames allowing transformations from ICRS or other celestial systems down to Alt/Az coordinates. [#3217]
  • astropy.coordinates now has a get_sun function that gives the coordinates of the Sun at a specified time. [#3217]
  • SkyCoord now has to_pixel and from_pixel methods that convert between celestial coordinates as SkyCoord objects and pixel coordinates given an astropy.wcs.WCS object. [#3002]
  • SkyCoord now has search_around_sky and search_around_3d convenience methods that allow searching for all coordinates within a certain distance of another SkyCoord. [#2953]
  • SkyCoord can now accept a frame instance for the frame= keyword argument. [#3063]
  • SkyCoord now has a guess_from_table method that can be used to quickly create SkyCoord objects from an astropy.table.Table object. [#2951]
  • astropy.coordinates now has a Galactocentric frame, a coordinate frame centered on a (user specified) center of the Milky Way. [#2761, #3286]
  • SkyCoord now accepts more formats of the coordinate string when the representation has ra and dec attributes. [#2920]
  • SkyCoord can now accept lists of SkyCoord objects, frame objects, or representation objects and will combine them into a single object. [#3285]
  • Frames and SkyCoord instances now have a method is_equivalent_frame that can be used to check that two frames are equivalent (ignoring the data). [#3330]
  • The __repr__ of coordinate objects now shows scalar coordinates in the same format as vector coordinates. [#3350, 3448]
• astropy.cosmology
  • Added lookback_distance, which is c * lookback_time. [#3145]
  • Add baryonic matter density and dark matter only density parameters to cosmology objects [#2757].
  • Add a clone method to cosmology objects to allow copies of cosmological objects to be created with the specified variables modified [#2592].
  • Increase default numerical precision of z_at_value following the accurate by default, fast by explicit request model [#3074].
  • Cosmology functions that take a single (redshift) input now broadcast like numpy ufuncs. So, passing an arbitrarily shaped array of inputs will produce an output of the same shape. [#3178, #3194]
• astropy.io.ascii
  • Simplify the way new Reader classes are defined, allowing custom behavior entirely by overriding inherited class attributes instead of setting instance attributes in the Reader __init__ method. [#2812]
  • There is now a faster C/Cython engine available for reading and writing simple ASCII formats like CSV. Both are enabled by default, and fast reading will fall back on an ordinary reader in case of a parsing failure. Their behavior can be altered with the parameter fast_reader in read and fast_writer in write. [#2716]
  • Make Latex/AASTex tables use unit attribute of Column for output. [#3064]
  • Store comment lines encountered during reading in metadata of the output table via meta['comment_lines']. [#3222]
  • Write comment lines in Table metadata during output for all basic formats, IPAC, and fast writers. This functionality can be disabled with comment=False. [#3255]
  • Add reader / writer for the Enhanced CSV format which stores table and column meta data, in particular data type and unit. [#2319]
• astropy.io.fits
  • The fitsdiff script ignores some things by default when comparing fits files (e.g. empty header lines). This adds a --exact option where nothing is ignored. [#2782, #3110]
  • The fitsheader script now takes a --keyword option to extract a specific keyword from the header of a FITS file, and a --table option to export headers into any of the data formats supported by astropy.table. [#2555, #2588]
  • Section now supports all advanced indexing features ndarray does (slices with any steps, integer arrays, boolean arrays, None, Ellipsis). It also properly returns scalars when this is appropriate. [#3148]
• astropy.io.votable
  • astropy.io.votable.parse now takes a datatype_mapping keyword argument to map invalid datatype names to valid ones in order to support non-compliant files. [#2675]
• astropy.modeling
  • Added the capability of creating new "compound" models by combining existing models using arithmetic operators. See the "What's New in 1.0" page in the Astropy documentation for more details. [#3231]
  • A new custom_model decorator/factory function has been added for converting normal functions to Model classes that can work within the Astropy modeling framework. This replaces the old custom_model_1d function which is now deprecated. The new function works the same as the old one but is less limited in the types of models it can be used to created. [#1763]
  • The Model and Fitter classes have .registry attributes which provide sets of all loaded Model and Fitter classes (this is useful for building UIs for models and fitting). [#2725]
  • A dict-like meta member was added to Model. it is to be used to store any optional information which is relevant to a project and is not in the standard Model class. [#2189]
  • Added Ellipse2D model. [#3124]
• astropy.nddata
  • New array-related utility functions in astropy.nddata.utils for adding and removing arrays from other arrays with different sizes/shapes. [#3201]
  • New metaclass NDDataBase for enforcing the nddata interface in subclasses without restricting implementation of the data storage. [#2905]
  • New mixin classes NDSlicingMixin for slicing, NDArithmeticMixin for arithmetic operations, and NDIOMixin for input/ouput in NDData. [#2905]
  • Added a decorator support_nddata that can be used to write functions that can either take separate arguments or NDData objects. [#2855]
• astropy.stats
  • Added mad_std() function. [#3208]
  • Added gaussian_fwhm_to_sigma and gaussian_sigma_to_fwhm constants. [#3208]
  • New function sigma_clipped_stats which can be used to quickly get common statistics for an array, using sigma clipping at the same time. [#3201]
• astropy.table
  • Changed the internal implementation of the Table class changed so that it no longer uses numpy structured arrays as the core table data container. [#2790, #3179]
  • Tables can now be written to an html file that includes interactive browsing capabilities. To write out to this format, use Table.write('filename.html', format='jsviewer'). [#2875]
  • A quantity property and to method were added to Table columns that allow the column values to be easily converted to astropy.units.Quantity objects. [#2950]
  • Add unique convenience method to table. [#3185]
• astropy.tests
  • Added a new Quantity-aware assert_quantity_allclose. [#3273]
  • Added column alignment formatting for better pprint viewing experience. [#3037]
• astropy.time
  • Time can now handle arbitrary array dimensions, with operations following standard numpy broadcasting rules. [#3138]
• astropy.units
  • Support for VOUnit has been updated to be compliant with version 1.0 of the standard. [#2901]
  • Added an insert method to insert values into a Quantity object. This is similar to the numpy.insert function. [#3049]
  • When viewed in IPython, Quantity objects with array values now render using LaTeX and scientific notation. [#2271]
  • Added units.quantity_input decorator to validate quantity inputs to a function for unit compatibility. [#3072]
  • Added units.astronomical_unit as a long form for units.au. [#3303]
• astropy.utils
  • Added a new decorator astropy.utils.wraps which acts as a replacement for the standard library's functools.wraps, the only difference being that the decorated function also preserves the wrapped function's call signature. [#2849]
  • astropy.utils.compat.numpy has been revised such that it can include patched versions of routines from newer numpy versions. The first addition is a version of broadcast_arrays that can be used with Quantity and other ndarray subclasses (using the subok=True flag). [#2327]
  • Added astropy.utils.resolve_name which returns a member of a module or class given the fully qualified dotted name of that object as a string. [#3389]
  • Added astropy.utils.minversion which can be used to check minimum version requirements of Python modules (to test for specific features and/ or bugs and the like). [#3389]
• astropy.visualization
  • Created astropy.visualization module and added functionality relating to image normalization (i.e. stretching and scaling) as well as a new script fits2bitmap that can produce a bitmap image from a FITS file. [#3201]
  • Added dictionary astropy.visualization.mpl_style.astropy_mpl_style which can be used to set a uniform plotstyle specifically for tutorials that is improved compared to matplotlib defaults. [#2719, #2787, #3200]
• astropy.wcs
  • wcslib has been upgraded to version 4.25. This brings a single new feature:
    • equinox and radesys will now be given default values conforming with the WCS specification if EQUINOXa and RADESYSa, respectively, are not present in the header.
  • The minimum required version of wcslib is now 4.24. [#2503]
  • Added a new function wcs_to_celestial_frame that can be used to find the astropy.coordinates celestial frame corresponding to a particular WCS. [#2730]
  • astropy.wcs.WCS.compare now supports a tolerance keyword argument to allow for approximate comparison of floating-point values. [#2503]
  • added pixel_scale_matrix, celestial, is_celestial, and has_celestial convenience attributes. Added proj_plane_pixel_scales, proj_plane_pixel_area, and non_celestial_pixel_scales utility functions for retrieving WCS pixel scale and area information [#2832, #3304]
  • Added two functions pixel_to_skycoord and skycoord_to_pixel that make it easy to convert between SkyCoord objects and pixel coordinates. [#2885]
  • all_world2pix now uses a much more sophisticated and complete algorithm to iteratively compute the inverse WCS transform. [#2816]
  • Add ability to use WCS object to define projections in Matplotlib, using the WCSAxes package. [#3183]
  • Added is_proj_plane_distorted for testing if pixels are distorted. [#3329]
• Misc
  • astropy._erfa was added as a new subpackage wrapping the functionality of the ERFA library in python. This is primarily of use for other astropy subpackages, but the API may be made more public in the future. [#2992]

API Changes

• astropy.coordinates

  • Subclasses of BaseCoordinateFrame which define a custom repr should be aware of the format expected in SkyCoord.__repr__(), which changed in this release. [#2704, #2882]
  • The CartesianPoints class (deprecated in v0.4) has now been removed. [#2990]
  • The previous astropy.coordinates.builtin_frames module is now a subpackage. Everything that was in the astropy.coordinates.builtin_frames module is still accessible from the new package, but the classes are now in separate modules. This should have no direct impact at the user level. [#3120]
  • Support for passing a frame as a positional argument in the SkyCoord class has now been deprecated, except in the case where a frame with data is passed as the sole positional argument. [#3152]
  • Improved __repr__ of coordinate objects representing a single coordinate point for the sake of easier copy/pasting. [#3350]

• astropy.cosmology

  • The functional interface to the cosmological routines as well as set_current and get_current (deprecated in v0.4) have now been removed. [#2990]

• astropy.io.ascii

  • Added a new argument to htmldict in the HTML reader named parser, which allows the user to specify which parser BeautifulSoup should use as a backend. [#2815]
  • Add FixedWidthTwoLine reader to guessing. This will allows to read tables that a copied from screen output like print my_table to be read automatically. Discussed in #3025 and #3099 [#3109]

• astropy.io.fits

  • A new optional argument cache has been added to astropy.io.fits.open(). When opening a FITS file from a URL, cache is a boolean value specifying whether or not to save the file locally in Astropy's download cache (True by default). [#3041]

• astropy.modeling

  • Model classes should now specify inputs and outputs class attributes instead of the old n_inputs and n_outputs. These should be tuples providing human-readable labels for all inputs and outputs of the model. The length of the tuple indicates the numbers of inputs and outputs. See "What's New in Astropy 1.0" for more details. [#2835]
  • It is no longer necessary to include __init__ or __call__ definitions in Model subclasses if all they do is wrap the super-method in order to provide a nice call signature to the docs. The inputs class attribute is now used to generate a nice call signature, so these methods should only be overridden by Model subclasses in order to provide new functionality. [#2835]
  • Most models included in Astropy now have sensible default values for most or all of their parameters. Call help(ModelClass) on any model to check what those defaults are. Most of them time they should be overridden, but some of them are useful (for example spatial offsets are always set at the origin by default). Another rule of thumb is that, where possible, default parameters are set so that the model is a no-op, or close to it, by default. [#2932]
  • The Model.inverse method has been changed to a property, so that now accessing model.inverse on a model returns a new model that implements that model's inverse, and calling model.inverse(...)` on some independent variable computes the value of the inverse (similar to what the old Model.invert() method was meant to do). [#3024]
  • The Model.invert() method has been removed entirely (it was never implemented and there should not be any existing code that relies on it). [#3024]
  • custom_model_1d is deprecated in favor of the new custom_model (see "New Features" above). [#1763]
  • The Model.param_dim property (deprecated in v0.4) has now been removed. [#2990]
  • The Beta1D and Beta2D models have been renamed to Moffat1D and Moffat2D. [#3029]

• astropy.nddata

  • flags, shape, size, dtype and ndim properties removed from astropy.nddata.NDData. [#2905]
  • Arithmetic operations, uncertainty propagation, slicing and automatic conversion to a numpy array removed from astropy.nddata.NDData. The class astropy.nddata.NDDataArray is functionally equivalent to the old NDData. [#2905]

• astropy.table

  • The Column.units property (deprecated in v0.3) has now been removed. [#2990]
  • The Row.data and Table._data attributes have been deprecated related to the change in Table implementation. They are replaced by Row.as_void() and Table.as_array() methods, respectively. [#2790]
  • The Table.create_mask method has been removed. This undocumented method was a development orphan and would cause corruption of the table if called. [#2790]
  • The return type for integer item access to a Column (e.g. col[12] or t['a'][12]) is now always a numpy scalar, numpy ndarray, or numpy MaskedArray. Previously if the column was multidimensional then a Column object would be returned. [#3095]
  • The representation of Table and Column objects has been changed to be formatted similar to the print output. [#3239]
  • An empty table can now be initialized without a names argument as long as a valid dtype argument (with names embedded) is supplied. [#3977]

• astropy.time

  • The Time.val and Time.vals properties (deprecated in v0.3) and the Time.lon, and Time.lat properties (deprecated in v0.4) have now been removed. [#2990]
  • Add decimalyear format that represents time as a decimal year. [#3265]

• astropy.units

  • Support for VOUnit has been updated to be compliant with version 1.0 of the standard. This means that some VOUnit strings that were rejected before are now acceptable. [#2901] Notably:

    • SI prefixes are supported on most units
    • Binary prefixes are supported on "bits" and "bytes"
    • Custom units can be defined "inline" by placing them between single quotes.

  • Unit.get_converter has been deprecated. It is not strictly necessary for end users, and it was confusing due to lack of support for Quantity objects. [#3456]

• astropy.utils

  • Some members of astropy.utils.misc were moved into new submodules. Specifically:

    • deprecated, deprecated_attribute, and lazyproperty -> astropy.utils.decorators
    • find_current_module, find_mod_objs -> astropy.utils.introspection

    All of these functions can be imported directly from astropy.utils which should be preferred over referencing individual submodules of astropy.utils. [#2857]

  • The ProgressBar.iterate class method (deprecated in v0.3) has now been removed. [#2990]

  • Updated astropy/utils/console.py ProgressBar() module to display output to IPython notebook with the addition of an interactive kwarg. [#2658] [#2789]

• astropy.wcs

  • The WCS.calcFootprint method (deprecated in v0.4) has now been removed. [#2990]
  • An invalid unit in a CUNITn keyword now displays a warning and returns a UnrecognizedUnit instance rather than raising an exception [#3190]

Bug Fixes

• astropy.convolution

  • astropy.convolution.discretize_model now handles arbitrary callables correctly [#2274].

• astropy.coordinates

  • Angle.to_string now outputs unicode arrays instead of object arrays. [#2981]
  • SkyCoord.to_string no longer gives an error when used with an array coordinate with more than one dimension. [#3340]
  • Fixed support for subclasses of UnitSphericalRepresentation and SphericalRepresentation [#3354, #3366]
  • Fixed latex display of array angles in IPython notebook. [#3480]

• astropy.io.ascii

  • In the CommentedHeader the data_start parameter now defaults to 0, which is the first uncommented line. Discussed in #2692. [#3054]
  • Position lines in FixedWidthTwoLine reader could consist of many characters. Now, only one character in addition to the delimiter is allowed. This bug was discovered as part of [#3109]
  • The IPAC table writer now consistently uses the fill_values keyword to specify the output null values. Previously the behavior was inconsistent or incorrect. [#3259]
  • The IPAC table reader now correctly interprets abbreviated column types. [#3279]
  • Tables that look almost, but not quite like DAOPhot tables could cause guessing to fail. [#3342]

• astropy.io.fits

  • Fixed the problem in fits.open of some filenames with colon (:) in the name being recognized as URLs instead of file names. [#3122]
  • Setting memmap=True in fits.open and related functions now raises a ValueError if opening a file in memory-mapped mode is impossible. [#2298]
  • CONTINUE cards no longer end the value of the final card in the series with an ampersand, per the specification of the CONTINUE card convention. [#3282]
  • Fixed a crash that occurred when reading an ASCII table containing zero-precision floating point fields. [#3422]
  • When a float field for an ASCII table has zero-precision a decimal point (with no digits following it) is still written to the field as long as there is space for it, as recommended by the FITS standard. This makes it less ambiguous that these columns should be interpreted as floats. [#3422]

• astropy.logger

  • Fix a bug that occurred when displaying warnings that produced an error message dictionary changed size during iteration. [#3353]

• astropy.modeling

  • Fixed a bug in SLSQPLSQFitter where the maxiter argument was not passed correctly to the optimizer. [#3339]

• astropy.table

  • Fix a problem where table.hstack fails to stack multiple references to the same table, e.g. table.hstack([t, t]). [#2995]
  • Fixed a problem where table.vstack and table.hstack failed to stack a single table, e.g. table.vstack([t]). [#3313]
  • Fix a problem when doing nested iterators on a single table. [#3358]
  • Fix an error when an empty list, tuple, or ndarray is used for item access within a table. This now returns the table with no rows. [#3442]

• astropy.time

  • When creating a Time object from a datetime object the time zone info is now correctly used. [#3160]
  • For Time objects, it is now checked that numerical input is finite. [#3396]

• astropy.units

  • Added a latex_inline unit format that returns the units in LaTeX math notation with negative exponents instead of fractions [#2622].

  • When using a unit that is deprecated in a given unit format, non-deprecated alternatives will be suggested. [#2806] For example:

    >>> import astropy.units as u
    >>> u.Unit('Angstrom', format='fits')
    WARNING: UnitsWarning: The unit 'Angstrom' has been deprecated
    in the FITS standard. Suggested: nm (with data multiplied by
    0.1).  [astropy.units.format.utils]
    

• astropy.utils

  • treat_deprecations_as_exceptions has been fixed to recognize Astropy deprecation warnings. [#3015]

• astropy.wcs

  • astropy.wcs.WCS.sub now accepts unicode strings as input on Python 2.x [#3356]

• Misc

  • Some modules and tests that would crash upon import when using a non-final release of Numpy (e.g. 1.9.0rc1). [#3471]

Other Changes and Additions

• Astropy v1.1.0 will be the last release series to officially support Python 2.6. A deprecation warning will now be issued when using Astropy in Python 2.6 (this warning can be disabled through the usual Python warning filtering mechanisms). [#3779]
• The bundled copy of astropy-helpers has been updated to v1.0. [#3515]
• Updated astropy.extern.configobj to Version 5. Version 5 uses six and the same code covers both Python 2 and Python 3. [#3149]
• astropy.coordinates
  • The repr of SkyCoord and coordinate frame classes now separate frame attributes and coordinate information. [#2704, #2882]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Overwriting an existing file using the clobber=True option no longer displays a warning message. [#1963]
  • fits.open no longer catches OSError exceptions on missing or unreadable files-- instead it raises the standard Python exceptions in such cases. [#2756, #2785]
• astropy.table
  • Sped up setting of Column slices by an order of magnitude. [#2994, #3020]
• Updated the bundled six module to version 1.7.3 and made 1.7.3 the minimum acceptable version of six. [#2814]
• The version of ERFA included with Astropy is now v1.1.1 [#2971]
• The code base is now fully Python 2 and 3 compatible and no longer requires 2to3. [#2033]
• funcsigs is included in utils.compat, but defaults to the inspect module components where available (3.3+) [#3151].
• The list of modules displayed in the pytest header can now be customized. [#3157]
• jinja2>=2.7 is now required to build the source code from the git repository, in order to allow the ERFA wrappers to be generated. [#3166]

0.4.5 (2015-02-16)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed unnecessary attempt to run git when importing astropy. In particular, fixed a crash in Python 3 that could result from this when importing Astropy when the the current working directory is an empty git repository. [#3475]

Other Changes and Additions

• Updated bundled copy of astropy-helpers to v0.4.6. [#3508]

0.4.4 (2015-01-21)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.vo.samp
  • astropy.vo.samp is now usable on Python builds that do not support the SSLv3 protocol (which depends both on the version of Python and the version of OpenSSL or LibreSSL that it is built against.) [#3308]

API Changes

• astropy.vo.samp
  • The default SSL protocol used is now determined from the default used in the Python ssl standard library. This default may be different depending on the exact version of Python you are using. [#3308]
• astropy.wcs
  • WCS allows slices of the form slice(None, x, y), which previously resulted in an unsliced copy being returned (note: this was previously incorrectly reported as fixed in v0.4.3) [#2909]

0.4.3 (2015-01-15)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.coordinates
  • The Distance class has been fixed to no longer rely on the deprecated cosmology functions. [#2991]
  • Ensure float32 values can be used in coordinate representations. [#2983]
  • Fix frame attribute inheritance in SkyCoord.transform_to() method so that the default attribute value (e.g. equinox) for the destination frame gets used if no corresponding value was explicitly specified. [#3106]

  • Angle accepts hours:mins or deg:mins initializers (without

    seconds). In these cases float minutes are also accepted. [#2843]

  • astropy.coordinates.SkyCoord objects are now copyable. [#2888]
  • astropy.coordinates.SkyCoord object attributes are now immutable. It is still technically possible to change the internal data for an array-valued coordinate object but this leads to inconsistencies [#2889] and should not be done. [#2888]
• astropy.cosmology
  • The ztol keyword argument to z_at_value now works correctly [#2993].
• astropy.io.ascii
  • Fix a bug in Python 3 when guessing file format using a file object as input. Also improve performance in same situation for Python 2. [#3132]
  • Fix a problem where URL was being downloaded for each guess. [#2001]
• astropy.io.fits
  • The in operator now works correctly for checking if an extension is in an HDUList (as given via EXTNAME, (EXTNAME, EXTVER) tuples, etc.) [#3060]
  • Added workaround for bug in MacOS X <= 10.8 that caused np.fromfile to fail. [#3078]
  • Added support for the RICE_ONE compression type synonym. [#3115]
• astropy.modeling
  • Fixed a test failure on Debian/PowerPC and Debian/s390x. [#2708]
  • Fixed crash in evaluating models that have more outputs than inputs--this case may not be handled as desired for all conceivable models of this format (some may have to implement custom prepare_inputs and prepare_outputs methods). But as long as all outputs can be assumed to have a shape determined from the broadcast of all inputs with all parameters then this can be used safely. [#3250]
• astropy.table
  • Fix a bug that caused join to fail for multi-dimensional columns. [#2984]
  • Fix a bug where MaskedColumn attributes which had been changed since the object was created were not being carried through when slicing. [#3023]
  • Fix a bug that prevented initializing a table from a structured array with multi-dimensional columns with copy=True. [#3034]
  • Fixed unnecessarily large unicode columns when instantiating a table from row data on Python 3. [#3052]
  • Improved the warning message when unable to aggregate non-numeric columns. [#2700]
• astropy.units
  • Operations on quantities with incompatible types now raises a much more informative TypeError. [#2934]
  • Quantity.tolist now overrides the ndarray method to give a NotImplementedError (by renaming the previous list method). [#3050]
  • Quantity.round now always returns a Quantity (previously it returned an ndarray for decimals>0). [#3062]
  • Ensured np.squeeze always returns a Quantity (it only worked if no dimensions were removed). [#3045]
  • Input to Quantity with a unit attribute no longer can get mangled with copy=False. [#3051]
  • Remove trailing space in __format__ calls for dimensionless quantities. [#3097]
  • Comparisons between units and non-unit-like objects now works correctly. [#3108]
  • Units with fractional powers are now correctly multiplied together by using rational arithmetic. [#3121]
  • Removed a few entries from spectral density equivalencies which did not make sense. [#3153]
• astropy.utils
  • Fixed an issue with the deprecated decorator on classes that invoke super() in their __init__ method. [#3004]
  • Fixed a bug which caused the metadata_conflicts parameter to be ignored in the astropy.utils.metadata.merge function. [#3294]
• astropy.vo
  • Fixed an issue with reconnecting to a SAMP Hub. [#2674]
• astropy.wcs
  • Invalid or out of range values passed to wcs_world2pix will now be correctly identified and returned as nan values. [#2965]
  • Fixed an issue which meant that Python thought WCS objects were iterable. [#3066]
• Misc
  • Astropy will now work if your Python interpreter does not have the bz2 module installed. [#3104]
  • Fixed ResourceWarning for astropy/extern/bundled/six.py that could occur sometimes after using Astropy in Python 3.4. [#3156]

Other Changes and Additions

• astropy.coordinates
  • Improved the agreement of the FK5 <-> Galactic conversion with other codes, and with the FK5 <-> FK4 <-> Galactic route. [#3107]

0.4.2 (2014-09-23)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.coordinates

  • Angle accepts hours:mins or deg:mins initializers (without

    seconds). In these cases float minutes are also accepted.

  • The repr for coordinate frames now displays the frame attributes (ex: ra, dec) in a consistent order. It should be noted that as part of this fix, the BaseCoordinateFrame.get_frame_attr_names() method now returns an OrderedDict instead of just a dict. [#2845]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Fixed a crash when reading scaled float data out of a FITS file that was loaded from a string (using HDUList.fromfile) rather than from a file. [#2710]
  • Fixed a crash when reading data from an HDU whose header contained in invalid value for the BLANK keyword (e.g., a string value instead of an integer as required by the FITS Standard). Invalid BLANK keywords are now warned about, but are otherwise ignored. [#2711]
  • Fixed a crash when reading the header of a tile-compressed HDU if that header contained invalid duplicate keywords resulting in a KeyError [#2750]
  • Fixed crash when reading gzip-compressed FITS tables through the Astropy Table interface. [#2783]
  • Fixed corruption when writing new FITS files through to gzipped files. [#2794]
  • Fixed crash when writing HDUs made with non-contiguous data arrays to file-like objects. [#2794]
  • It is now possible to create astropy.io.fits.BinTableHDU objects with a table with zero rows. [#2916]
• astropy.io.misc
  • Fixed a bug that prevented h5py Dataset objects from being automatically recognized by Table.read. [#2831]
• astropy.modeling
  • Make LevMarLSQFitter work with weights keyword. [#2900]
• astropy.table
  • Fixed reference cycle in tables that could prevent Table objects from being freed from memory. [#2879]
  • Fixed an issue where Table.pprint() did not print the header to stdout when stdout is redirected (say, to a file). [#2878]
  • Fixed printing of masked values when a format is specified. [#1026]
  • Ensured that numpy ufuncs that return booleans return plain ndarray instances, just like the comparison operators. [#2963]
• astropy.time
  • Ensure bigendian input to Time works on a little-endian machine (and vice versa). [#2942]
• astropy.units
  • Ensure unit is kept when adding 0 to quantities. [#2968]
• astropy.utils
  • Fixed color printing on Windows with IPython 2.0. [#2878]
• astropy.vo
  • Improved error message on Cone Search time out. [#2687]

Other Changes and Additions

• Fixed a couple issues with files being inappropriately included and/or excluded from the source archive distributions of Astropy. [#2843, #2854]
• As part of fixing the fact that masked elements of table columns could not be printed when a format was specified, the column format string options were expanded to allow simple specifiers such as '5.2f'. [#2898]
• Ensure numpy 1.9 is supported. [#2917]
• Ensure numpy master is supported, by making np.cbrt work with quantities. [#2937]

0.4.1 (2014-08-08)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.config

  • Fixed a bug where an unedited configuration file from astropy 0.3.2 would not be correctly identified as unedited. [#2772] This resulted in the warning:

    WARNING: ConfigurationChangedWarning: The configuration options
    in astropy 0.4 may have changed, your configuration file was not
    updated in order to preserve local changes.  A new configuration
    template has been saved to
    '~/.astropy/config/astropy.0.4.cfg'. [astropy.config.configuration]
    

  • Fixed the error message that is displayed when an old configuration item has moved. Before, the destination section was wrong. [#2772]

  • Added configuration settings for io.fits, io.votable and table.jsviewer that were missing from the configuration file template. [#2772]

  • The configuration template is no longer rewritten on every import of astropy, causing race conditions. [#2805]

• astropy.convolution

  • Fixed the multiplication of Kernel with numpy floats. [#2174]

• astropy.coordinates

  • Distance can now take a list of quantities. [#2261]
  • For in-place operations for Angle instances in which the result unit is not an angle, an exception is raised before the instance is corrupted. [#2718]
  • CartesianPoints are now deprecated in favor of CartesianRepresentation. [#2727]

• astropy.io.misc

  • An existing table within an HDF5 file can be overwritten without affecting other datasets in the same HDF5 file by simultaneously using overwrite=True and append=True arguments to the Table.write method. [#2624]

• astropy.logger

  • Fixed a crash that could occur in rare cases when (such as in bundled apps) where submodules of the email package are not importable. [#2671]

• astropy.nddata

  • astropy.nddata.NDData() no longer raises a ValueError when passed a numpy masked array which has no masked entries. [#2784]

• astropy.table

  • When saving a table to a FITS file containing a unit that is not supported by the FITS standard, a warning rather than an exception is raised. [#2797]

• astropy.units

  • By default, Quantity and its subclasses will now convert to float also numerical types such as decimal.Decimal, which are stored as objects by numpy. [#1419]
  • The units count, pixel, voxel and dbyte now output to FITS, OGIP and VOUnit formats correctly. [#2798]

• astropy.utils

  • Restored missing information from deprecation warning messages from the deprecated decorator. [#2811]
  • Fixed support for staticmethod deprecation in the deprecated decorator. [#2811]

• astropy.wcs

  • Fixed a memory leak when astropy.wcs.WCS objects are copied [#2754]
  • Fixed a crash when passing ra_dec_order=True to any of the *2world methods. [#2791]

Other Changes and Additions

• Bundled copy of astropy-helpers upgraded to v0.4.1. [#2825]
• General improvements to documentation and docstrings [#2722, #2728, #2742]
• Made it easier for third-party packagers to have Astropy use their own version of the six module (so long as it meets the minimum version requirement) and remove the copy bundled with Astropy. See the astropy/extern/README file in the source tree. [#2623]

0.4 (2014-07-16)

New Features

• astropy.constants
  • Added b_wien to represent Wien wavelength displacement law constant. [#2194]
• astropy.convolution
  • Changed the input parameter in Gaussian1DKernel and Gaussian2DKernel from width to stddev [#2085].
• astropy.coordinates
  • The coordinates package has undergone major changes to implement APE5 . These include backwards-incompatible changes, as the underlying framework has changed substantially. See the APE5 text and the package documentation for more details. [#2422]
  • A position_angle method has been added to the new SkyCoord. [#2487]
  • Updated Angle.dms and Angle.hms to return namedtuple -s instead of regular tuples, and added Angle.signed_dms attribute that gives the absolute value of the d, m, and s along with the sign. [#1988]
  • By default, Distance objects are now required to be positive. To allow negative values, set allow_negative=True in the Distance constructor when creating a Distance instance.
  • Longitude (resp. Latitude) objects cannot be used any more to initialize or set Latitude (resp. Longitude) objects. An explicit conversion to Angle is now required. [#2461]
  • The deprecated functions for pre-0.3 coordinate object names like ICRSCoordinates have been removed. [#2422]
  • The rotation_matrix and angle_axis functions in astropy.coordinates.angles were made more numerically consistent and are now tested explicitly [#2619]
• astropy.cosmology
  • Added z_at_value function to find the redshift at which a cosmology function matches a desired value. [#1909]
  • Added FLRW.differential_comoving_volume method to give the differential comoving volume at redshift z. [#2103]
  • The functional interface is now deprecated in favor of the more-explicit use of methods on cosmology objects. [#2343]
  • Updated documentation to reflect the removal of the functional interface. [#2507]
• astropy.io.ascii
  • The astropy.io.ascii output formats latex and aastex accept a dictionary called latex_dict to specify options for LaTeX output. It is now possible to specify the table alignment within the text via the tablealign keyword. [#1838]
  • If header_start is specified in a call to ascii.get_reader or any method that calls get_reader (e.g. ascii.read) but data_start is not specified at the same time, then data_start is calculated so that the data starts after the header. Before this, the default was that the header line was read again as the first data line [#855 and #1844].
  • A new csv format was added as a convenience for handling CSV (comma- separated values) data. [#1935] This format also recognises rows with an inconsistent number of elements. [#1562]
  • An option was added to guess the start of data for CDS format files when they do not strictly conform to the format standard. [#2241]
  • Added an HTML reader and writer to the astropy.io.ascii package. Parsing requires the installation of BeautifulSoup and is therefore an optional feature. [#2160]
  • Added support for inputting column descriptions and column units with the io.ascii.SExtractor reader. [#2372]
  • Allow the use of non-local ReadMe files in the CDS reader. [#2329]
  • Provide a mechanism to select how masked values are printed. [#2424]
  • Added support for reading multi-aperture daophot file. [#2656]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Included a new command-line script called fitsheader to display the header(s) of a FITS file from the command line. [#2092]
  • Added new verification options fix+ignore, fix+warn, fix+exception, silentfix+ignore, silentfix+warn, and silentfix+exception which give more control over how to report fixable errors as opposed to unfixable errors.
• astropy.modeling
  • Prototype implementation of fitters that treat optimization algorithms separately from fit statistics, allowing new fitters to be created by mixing and matching optimizers and statistic functions. [#1914]
  • Slight overhaul to how inputs to and outputs from models are handled with respect to array-valued parameters and variables, as well as sets of multiple models. See the associated PR and the modeling section of the v0.4 documentation for more details. [#2634]
  • Added a new SimplexLSQFitter which uses a downhill simplex optimizer with a least squares statistic. [#1914]
  • Changed Gaussian2D model such that theta now increases counterclockwise. [#2199]
  • Replaced the MatrixRotation2D model with a new model called simply Rotation2D which requires only an angle to specify the rotation. The new Rotation2D rotates in a counter-clockwise sense whereas the old MatrixRotation2D increased the angle clockwise. [#2266, #2269]
  • Added a new AffineTransformation2D model which serves as a replacement for the capability of MatrixRotation2D to accept an arbitrary matrix, while also adding a translation capability. [#2269]
  • Added GaussianAbsorption1D model. [#2215]
  • New Redshift model [#2176].
• astropy.nddata
  • Allow initialization NDData or StdDevUncertainty with a Quantity. [#2380]
• astropy.stats
  • Added flat prior to binom_conf_interval and binned_binom_proportion
  • Change default in sigma_clip from np.median to np.ma.median. [#2582]
• astropy.sphinx
  • Note, the following new features are included in astropy-helpers as well:
  • The automodapi and automodsumm extensions now include sphinx configuration options to write out what automodapi and automodsumm generate, mainly for debugging purposes. [#1975, #2022]
  • Reference documentation now shows functions/class docstrings at the inteded user-facing API location rather than the actual file where the implementation is found. [#1826]
  • The automodsumm extension configuration was changed to generate documentation of class __call__ member functions. [#1817, #2135]
  • automodapi and automodsumm now have an :allowed-package-names: option that make it possible to document functions and classes that are in a different namespace. [#2370]
• astropy.table
  • Improved grouped table aggregation by using the numpy reduceat() method when possible. This can speed up the operation by a factor of at least 10 to 100 for large unmasked tables and columns with relatively small group sizes. [#2625]
  • Allow row-oriented data input using a new rows keyword argument. [#850]
  • Allow subclassing of Table and the component classes Row, Column, MaskedColumn, TableColumns, and TableFormatter. [#2287]
  • Fix to allow numpy integer types as valid indices into tables in Python 3.x [#2477]
  • Remove transition code related to the order change in Column and MaskedColumn arguments name and data from Astropy 0.2 to 0.3. [#2511]
  • Change HTML table representation in IPython notebook to show all table columns instead of restricting to 80 column width. [#2651]
• astropy.time
  • Mean and apparent sidereal time can now be calculated using the sidereal_time method [#1418].
  • The time scale now defaults to UTC if no scale is provided. [#2091]
  • TimeDelta objects can have all scales but UTC, as well as, for consistency with time-like quantities, undefined scale (where the scale is taken from the object one adds to or subtracts from). This allows, e.g., to work consistently in TDB. [#1932]
  • Time now supports ISO format strings that end in "Z". [#2211, #2203]
• astropy.units
  • Support for the unit format Office of Guest Investigator Programs (OGIP) FITS files has been added. [#377]
  • The spectral equivalency can now handle angular wave number. [#1306 and #1899]
  • Added one as a shorthand for dimensionless_unscaled. [#1980]
  • Added dex and dB units. [#1628]
  • Added temperature() equivalencies to support conversion between Kelvin, Celsius, and Fahrenheit. [#2209]
  • Added temperature_energy() equivalencies to support conversion between electron-volt and Kelvin. [#2637]
  • The runtime of astropy.units.Unit.compose is greatly improved (by a factor of 2 in most cases) [#2544]
  • Added electron unit. [#2599]
• astropy.utils
  • timer.RunTimePredictor now uses astropy.modeling in its do_fit() method. [#1896]
• astropy.vo
  • A new sub-package, astropy.vo.samp, is now available (this was previously the SAMPy package, which has been refactored for use in Astropy). [#1907]
  • Enhanced functionalities for VOSCatalog and VOSDatabase. [#1206]
• astropy.wcs
  • astropy now requires wcslib version 4.23. The version of wcslib included with astropy has been updated to version 4.23.
  • Bounds checking is now performed on native spherical coordinates. Any out-of-bounds values will be returned as NaN, and marked in the stat array, if using the low-level wcslib interface such as astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.p2s. [#2107]
  • A new method, astropy.wcs.WCS.compare(), compares two wcsprm structs for equality with varying degrees of strictness. [#2361]
  • New astropy.wcs.utils module, with a handful of tools for manipulating WCS objects, including dropping, swapping, and adding axes.
• Misc
  • Includes the new astropy-helpers package which separates some of Astropy's build, installation, and documentation infrastructure out into an independent package, making it easier for Affiliated Packages to depend on these features. astropy-helpers replaces/deprecates some of the submodules in the astropy package (see API Changes below). See also APE 4 for more details on the motivation behind and implementation of astropy-helpers. [#1563]

API Changes

• astropy.config

  • The configuration system received a major overhaul, as part of APE3. It is no longer possible to save configuration items from Python, but instead users must edit the configuration file directly. The locations of configuration items have moved, and some have been changed to science state values. The old locations should continue to work until astropy 0.5, but deprecation warnings will be displayed. See the Configuration transition docs for a detailed description of the changes and how to update existing code. [#2094]

• astropy.io.fits

  • The astropy.io.fits.new_table function is now fully deprecated (though will not be removed for a long time, considering how widely it is used).

    Instead please use the more explicit BinTableHDU.from_columns to create a new binary table HDU, and the similar TableHDU.from_columns to create a new ASCII table. These otherwise accept the same arguments as new_table which is now just a wrapper for these.

  • The .fromstring classmethod of each HDU type has been simplified such that, true to its namesake, it only initializes an HDU from a string containing its header and data.

  • Fixed an issue where header wildcard matching (for example header['DATE*']) can be used to match any characters that might appear in a keyword. Previously this only matched keywords containing characters in the set [0-9A-Za-z_]. Now this can also match a hyphen - and any other characters, as some conventions like HIERARCH and record-valued keyword cards allow a wider range of valid characters than standard FITS keywords.

  • This will be the last release to support the following APIs that have been marked deprecated since Astropy v0.1/PyFITS v3.1:

    • The CardList class, which was part of the old header implementation.
    • The Card.key attribute. Use Card.keyword instead.
    • The Card.cardimage and Card.ascardimage attributes. Use simply Card.image or str(card) instead.
    • The create_card factory function. Simply use the normal Card constructor instead.
    • The create_card_from_string factory function. Use Card.fromstring instead.
    • The upper_key function. Use Card.normalize_keyword method instead (this is not unlikely to be used outside of PyFITS itself, but it was technically public API).
    • The usage of Header.update with Header.update(keyword, value, comment) arguments. Header.update should only be used analogously to dict.update. Use Header.set instead.
    • The Header.ascard attribute. Use Header.cards instead for a list of all the Card objects in the header.
    • The Header.rename_key method. Use Header.rename_keyword instead.
    • The Header.get_history method. Use header['HISTORY'] instead (normal keyword lookup).
    • The Header.get_comment method. Use header['COMMENT'] instead.
    • The Header.toTxtFile method. Use header.totextfile instead.
    • The Header.fromTxtFile method. Use Header.fromtextfile instead.
    • The tdump and tcreate functions. Use tabledump and tableload respectively.
    • The BinTableHDU.tdump and tcreate methods. Use BinTableHDU.dump and BinTableHDU.load respectively.
    • The txtfile argument to the Header constructor. Use Header.fromfile instead.
    • The startColumn and endColumn arguments to the FITS_record constructor. These are unlikely to be used by any user code.

    These deprecated interfaces will be removed from the development version of Astropy following the v0.4 release (they will still be available in any v0.4.x bugfix releases, however).

• astropy.modeling

  • The method computing the derivative of the model with respect to parameters was renamed from deriv to fit_deriv. [#1739]

  • ParametricModel and the associated Parametric1DModel and Parametric2DModel classes have been renamed FittableModel, Fittable1DModel, and Fittable2DModel respectively. The base Model class has subsumed the functionality of the old

    ParametricModel class so that all models support parameter constraints. The only distinction of FittableModel is that anything which subclasses it is assumed "safe" to use with Astropy fitters. [#2276]

  • NonLinearLSQFitter has been renamed LevMarLSQFitter to emphasise that it uses the Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithm with a least squares statistic function. [#1914]

  • The SLSQPFitter class has been renamed SLSQPLSQFitter to emphasize that it uses the Sequential Least Squares Programming optimization algorithm with a least squares statistic function. [#1914]

  • The Fitter.errorfunc method has been renamed to the more general Fitter.objective_function. [#1914]

• astropy.nddata

  • Issue warning if unit is changed from a non-trivial value by directly setting NDData.unit. [#2411]
  • The mask and flag attributes of astropy.nddata.NDData can now be set with any array-like object instead of requiring that they be set with a numpy.ndarray. [#2419]

• astropy.sphinx

  • Use of the astropy.sphinx module is deprecated; all new development of this module is in astropy_helpers.sphinx which should be used instead (therefore documentation builds that made use of any of the utilities in astropy.sphinx now have astropy_helpers as a documentation dependency).

• astropy.table

  • The default table printing function now shows a table header row for units if any columns have the unit attribute set. [#1282]
  • Before, an unmasked Table was automatically converted to a masked table if generated from a masked Table or a MaskedColumn. Now, this conversion is only done if explicitly requested or if any of the input values is actually masked. [#1185]
  • The repr() function of astropy.table.Table now shows the units if any columns have the unit attribute set. [#2180]
  • The semantics of the config options table.max_lines and table.max_width has changed slightly. If these values are not set in the config file, astropy will try to determine the size automatically from the terminal. [#2683]

• astropy.time

  • Correct use of UT in TDB calculation [#1938, #1939].
  • TimeDelta objects can have scales other than TAI [#1932].
  • Location information should now be passed on via an EarthLocation instance or anything that initialises it, e.g., a tuple containing either geocentric or geodetic coordinates. [#1928]

• astropy.units

  • Quantity now converts input to float by default, as this is physically most sensible for nearly all units [#1776].
  • Quantity comparisons with == or != now always return True or False, even if units do not match (for which case a UnitsError used to be raised). [#2328]
  • Applying float or int to a Quantity now works for all dimensionless quantities; they are automatically converted to unscaled dimensionless. [#2249]
  • The exception astropy.units.UnitException, which was deprecated in astropy 0.2, has been removed. Use astropy.units.UnitError instead [#2386]
  • Initializing a Quantity with a valid number/array with a unit attribute now interprets that attribute as the units of the input value. This makes it possible to initialize a Quantity from an Astropy Table column and have it correctly pick up the units from the column. [#2486]

• astropy.wcs

  • calcFootprint was deprecated. It is replaced by calc_footprint. An optional boolean keyword center was added to calc_footprint. It controls whether the centers or the corners of the pixels are used in the computation. [#2384]
  • astropy.wcs.WCS.sip_pix2foc and astropy.wcs.WCS.sip_foc2pix formerly did not conform to the SIP standard: CRPIX was added to the foc result so that it could be used as input to "core FITS WCS". As of astropy 0.4, CRPIX is no longer added to the result, so the foc space is correct as defined in the SIP convention. [#2360]
  • astropy.wcs.UnitConverter, which was deprecated in astropy 0.2, has been removed. Use the astropy.units module instead. [#2386]
  • The following methods on astropy.wcs.WCS, which were deprecated in astropy 0.1, have been removed [#2386]:
    • all_pix2sky -> all_pix2world
    • wcs_pix2sky -> wcs_pix2world
    • wcs_sky2pix -> wcs_world2pix
  • The naxis1 and naxis2 attributes and the get_naxis method of astropy.wcs.WCS, which were deprecated in astropy 0.2, have been removed. Use the shape of the underlying FITS data array instead. [#2386]

• Misc

  • The astropy.setup_helpers and astropy.version_helpers modules are deprecated; any non-critical fixes and development to those modules should be in astropy_helpers instead. Packages that use these modules in their setup.py should depend on astropy_helpers following the same pattern as in the Astropy package template.

Bug Fixes

• astropy.constants
  • astropy.constants.Contant objects can now be deep copied. [#2601]
• astropy.cosmology
  • The distance modulus function in astropy.cosmology can now handle negative distances, which can occur in certain closed cosmologies. [#2008]
  • Removed accidental imports of some extraneous variables in astropy.cosmology [#2025]
• astropy.io.ascii
  • astropy.io.ascii.read would fail to read lists of strings where some of the strings consisted of just a newline ("n"). [#2648]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Use NaN for missing values in FITS when using Table.write for float columns. Earlier the default fill value was close to 1e20.[#2186]
  • Fixes for checksums on 32-bit platforms. Results may be different if writing or checking checksums in "nonstandard" mode. [#2484]
  • Additional minor bug fixes ported from PyFITS. [#2575]
• astropy.io.votable
  • It is now possible to save an astropy.table.Table object as a VOTable with any of the supported data formats, tabledata, binary and binary2, by using the tabledata_format kwarg. [#2138]
  • Fixed a crash writing out variable length arrays. [#2577]
• astropy.nddata
  • Indexing NDData in a way that results in a single element returns that element. [#2170]
  • Change construction of result of arithmetic and unit conversion to allow subclasses to require the presence of attribute like unit. [#2300]
  • Scale uncertainties to correct units in arithmetic operations and unit conversion. [#2393]
  • Ensure uncertainty and mask members are copied in arithmetic and convert_unit_to. [#2394]
  • Mask result of arithmetic if either of the operands is masked. [#2403]
  • Copy all attributes of input object if astropy.nddata.NDData is initialized with an NDData object. [#2406]
  • Copy flags to new object in convert_unit_to. [#2409]
  • Result of NDData arithmetic makes a copy of any WCS instead of using a reference. [#2410]
  • Fix unit handling for multiplication/division and use astropy.units.Quantity for units arithmetic. [#2413]
  • A masked NDData is now converted to a masked array when used in an operation or ufunc with a numpy array. [#2414]
  • An unmasked NDData now uses an internal representation of its mask state that numpy.ma expects so that an NDData behaves as an unmasked array. [#2417]
• astropy.sphinx
  • Fix crash in smart resolver when the resolution doesn't work. [#2591]
• astropy.table
  • The astropy.table.Column object can now use both functions and callable objects as formats. [#2313]
  • Fixed a problem on 64 bit windows that caused errors "expected 'DTYPE_t' but got 'long long'" [#2490]
  • Fix initialisation of TableColumns with lists or tuples. [#2647]
  • Fix removal of single column using remove_columns. [#2699]
  • Fix a problem that setting a row element within a masked table did not update the corresponding table element. [#2734]
• astropy.time
  • Correct UT1->UTC->UT1 round-trip being off by 1 second if UT1 is on a leap second. [#2077]
• astropy.units
  • Quantity.copy now behaves identically to ndarray.copy, and thus supports the order argument (for numpy >=1.6). [#2284]
  • Composing base units into identical composite units now works. [#2382]
  • Creating and composing/decomposing units is now substantially faster [#2544]
  • Quantity objects now are able to be assigned NaN [#2695]
• astropy.wcs
  • Astropy now requires wcslib version 4.23. The version of wcslib included with astropy has been updated to version 4.23.
  • Bug fixes in the projection routines: in hpxx2s [the cartesian-to-spherical operation of the HPX projection] relating to bounds checking, bug introduced at wcslib 4.20; in parx2s and molx2s`` [the cartesion-to-spherical operation of the PAR and MOL projections respectively] relating to setting the stat vector; in hpxx2s relating to implementation of the vector API; and in xphx2s relating to setting an out-of-bounds value of phi.
  • In the PCO projection, use alternative projection equations for greater numerical precision near theta == 0. In the COP projection, return an exact result for theta at the poles. Relaxed the tolerance for bounds checking a little in SFL projection.
  • Fix a bug allocating insufficient memory in astropy.wcs.WCS.sub [#2468]
  • A new method, Wcsprm.bounds_check (corresponding to wcslib's wcsbchk) has been added to control what bounds checking is performed by wcslib.
  • WCS.to_header will now raise a more meaningful exception when the WCS information is invalid or inconsistent in some way. [#1854]
  • In WCS.to_header, RESTFRQ and RESTWAV are no longer rewritten if zero. [#2468]
  • In WCS.to_header, floating point values will now always be written with an exponent or fractional part, i.e. .0 being appended if necessary to acheive this. [#2468]
  • If the C extension for astropy.wcs was not built or fails to import for any reason, import astropy.wcs will result in an ImportError, rather than getting obscure errors once the astropy.wcs is used. [#2061]
  • When the C extension for astropy.wcs is built using a version of wscslib already present in the system, the package does not try to install wcslib headers under astropy/wcs/include. [#2536]
  • Fixes an unresolved external symbol error in the astropy.wcs._wcs C extension on Microsoft Windows when built with a Microsoft compiler. [#2478]
• Misc
  • Running the test suite with python setup.py test now works if the path to the source contains spaces. [#2488]
  • The version of ERFA included with Astropy is now v1.1.0 [#2497]
  • Removed deprecated option from travis configuration and force use of wheels rather than allowing build from source. [#2576]
  • The short option -n to run tests in parallel was broken (conflicts with the distutils built-in option of "dry-run"). Changed to -j. [#2566]

Other Changes and Additions

• python setup.py test --coverage will now give more accurate results, because the coverage analysis will include early imports of astropy. There doesn't seem to be a way to get this to work when doing import astropy; astropy.test(), so the coverage keyword to astropy.test has been removed. Coverage testing now depends only on coverage.py, not pytest-cov. [#2112]
• The included version of py.test has been upgraded to 2.5.1. [#1970]
• The included version of six.py has been upgraded to 1.5.2. [#2006]
• Where appropriate, tests are now run both with and without the unicode_literals option to ensure that we support both cases. [#1962]
• Running the Astropy test suite from within the IPython REPL is disabled for now due to bad interaction between the test runner and IPython's logging and I/O handler. For now, run the Astropy tests should be run in the basic Python interpreter. [#2684]
• Added support for numerical comparison of floating point values appearing in the output of doctests using a +FLOAT_CMP doctest flag. [#2087]
• A monkey patch is performed to fix a bug in Numpy version 1.7 and earlier where unicode fill values on masked arrays are not supported. This may cause unintended side effects if your application also monkey patches numpy.ma or relies on the broken behavior. If unicode support of masked arrays is important to your application, upgrade to Numpy 1.8 or later for best results. [#2059]
• The developer documentation has been extensively rearranged and rewritten. [#1712]
• The human_time function in astropy.utils now returns strings without zero padding. [#2420]
• The bdist_dmg command for setup.py has now been removed. [#2553]
• Many broken API links have been fixed in the documentation, and the nitpick Sphinx option is now used to avoid broken links in future. [#1221, #2019, #2109, #2161, #2162, #2192, #2200, #2296, #2448, #2456, #2460, #2467, #2476, #2508, #2509]

0.3.2 (2014-05-13)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.coordinates
  • if sep argument is specified to be a single character in sexagisimal_to_string, it now includes seperators only between items [#2183]
  • Ensure comparisons involving Distance objects do not raise exceptions; also ensure operations that lead to units other than length return Quantity. [#2206, #2250]
  • Multiplication and division of Angle objects is now supported. [#2273]
  • Fixed Angle.to_string functionality so that negative angles have the correct amount of padding when pad=True. [#2337]
  • Mixing strings and quantities in the Angle constructor now works. For example: Angle(['1d', 1. * u.d]). [#2398]
  • If Longitude is given a Longitude as input, use its wrap_angle by default [#2705]
• astropy.cosmology
  • Fixed format() compatibility with Python 2.6. [#2129]
  • Be more careful about converting to floating point internally [#1815, #1818]
• astropy.io.ascii
  • The CDS reader in astropy.io.ascii can now handle multiple description lines in ReadMe files. [#2225]
  • When reading a table with values that generate an overflow error during type conversion (e.g. overflowing the native C long type), fall through to using string. Previously this generated an exception [#2234].
  • Some CDS files mark missing values with "---", others with "--". Recognize any string with one to four dashes as null value. [#1335]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Allow pickling of FITS_rec objects. [#1597]
  • Improved behavior when writing large compressed images on OSX by removing an unnecessary check for platform architecture. [#2345]
  • Fixed an issue where Astropy Table objects containing boolean columns were not correctly written out to FITS files. [#1953]
  • Several other bug fixes ported from PyFITS v3.2.3 [#2368]
  • Fixed a crash on Python 2.x when writing a FITS file directly to a StringIO.StringIO object. [#2463]
• astropy.io.registry
  • Allow readers/writers with the same name to be attached to different classes. [#2312]
• astropy.io.votable
  • By default, floating point values are now written out using repr rather than str to preserve precision [#2137]
• astropy.modeling
  • Fixed the SIP and InverseSIP models both so that they work in the first place, and so that they return results consistent with the SIP functions in astropy.wcs. [#2177]
• astropy.stats
  • Ensure the axis keyword in astropy.stats.funcs can now be used for all axes. [#2173]
• astropy.table
  • Ensure nameless columns can be printed, using 'None' for the header. [#2213]
• astropy.time
  • Fixed pickling of Time objects. [#2123]
• astropy.units
  • Quantity._repr_latex_() returns NotImplementedError for quantity arrays instead of an uninformative formatting exception. [#2258]
  • Ensure Quantity.flat always returns Quantity. [#2251]
  • Angstrom unit renders better in MathJax [#2286]
• astropy.utils
  • Progress bars will now be displayed inside the IPython qtconsole. [#2230]
  • data.download_file() now evaluates REMOTE_TIMEOUT() at runtime rather than import time. Previously, setting REMOTE_TIMEOUT after import had no effect on the function's behavior. [#2302]
  • Progressbar will be limited to 100% so that the bar does not exceed the terminal width. The numerical display can still exceed 100%, however.
  • Converted representation of progress bar units without suffix from float to int in console.human_file_size. [#2201,#2202,#2721,#3299]
• astropy.vo
  • Fixed format() compatibility with Python 2.6. [#2129]
  • Cone Search validation no longer raises ConeSearchError for positive RA. [#2240, #2242]
• astropy.wcs
  • Fixed a bug where calling astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.sub with WCSSUB_CELESTIAL may cause memory corruption due to underallocation of a temporary buffer. [#2350]
  • Fixed a memory allocation bug in astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.sub and astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.copy. [#2439]
• Misc
  • Fixes for compatibility with Python 3.4. [#1945]
  • import astropy; astropy.test() now correctly uses the same test configuration as python setup.py test [#1811]

0.3.1 (2014-03-04)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.config

  • Fixed a bug where ConfigurationItem.set_temp() does not reset to default value when exception is raised within with block. [#2117]

• astropy.convolution

  • Fixed a bug where _truncation was left undefined for CustomKernel. [#2016]
  • Fixed a bug with _normalization when CustomKernel input array sums to zero. [#2016]

• astropy.coordinates

  • Fixed a bug where using == on two array coordinates wouldn't work. [#1832]
  • Fixed bug which caused len() not to work for coordinate objects and added a .shape property to get appropriately array-like behavior. [#1761, #2014]
  • Fixed a bug where sexagesimal notation would sometimes include exponential notation in the last field. [#1908, #1913]
  • CompositeStaticMatrixTransform no longer attempts to reference the undefined variable self.matrix during instantiation. [#1944]
  • Fixed pickling of Longitude, ensuring wrap_angle is preserved [#1961]
  • Allow sep argument in Angle.to_string to be empty (resulting in no separators) [#1989]

• astropy.io.ascii

  • Allow passing unicode delimiters when reading or writing tables. The delimiter must be convertible to pure ASCII. [#1949]
  • Fix a problem when reading a table and renaming the columns to names that already exist. [#1991]

• astropy.io.fits

  • Ported all bug fixes from PyFITS 3.2.1. See the PyFITS changelog at http://pyfits.readthedocs.org/en/v3.2.1/ [#2056]

• astropy.io.misc

  • Fixed issues in the HDF5 Table reader/writer functions that occurred on Windows. [#2099]

• astropy.io.votable

  • The write_null_values kwarg to VOTable.to_xml, when set to False (the default) would produce non-standard VOTable files. Therefore, this functionality has been replaced by a better understanding that knows which fields in a VOTable may be left empty (only char, float and double in VOTable 1.1 and 1.2, and all fields in VOTable 1.3). The kwarg is still accepted but it will be ignored, and a warning is emitted. [#1809]
  • Printing out a astropy.io.votable.tree.Table object using repr or str now uses the pretty formatting in astropy.table, so it's possible to easily preview the contents of a VOTable. [#1766]

• astropy.modeling

  • Fixed bug in computation of model derivatives in LinearLSQFitter. [#1903]
  • Raise a NotImplementedError when fitting composite models. [#1915]
  • Fixed bug in the computation of the Gaussian2D model. [#2038]
  • Fixed bug in the computation of the AiryDisk2D model. [#2093]

• astropy.sphinx

  • Added slightly more useful debug info for AstropyAutosummary. [#2024]

• astropy.table

  • The column string representation for n-dimensional cells with only one element has been fixed. [#1522]
  • Fix a problem that caused MaskedColumn.__getitem__ to not preserve column metadata. [#1471, #1872]
  • With Numpy prior to version 1.6.2, tables with Unicode columns now sort correctly. [#1867]
  • astropy.table can now print out tables with Unicode columns containing non-ascii characters. [#1864]
  • Columns can now be named with Unicode strings, as long as they contain only ascii characters. This makes using astropy.table easier on Python 2 when from __future__ import unicode_literals is used. [#1864]
  • Allow pickling of Table, Column, and MaskedColumn objects. [#792]
  • Fix a problem where it was not possible to rename columns after sorting or adding a row. [#2039]

• astropy.time

  • Fix a problem where scale conversion problem in TimeFromEpoch was not showing a useful error [#2046]
  • Fix a problem when converting to one of the formats unix, cxcsec, gps or plot_date when the time scale is UT1, TDB or TCB [#1732]
  • Ensure that delta_ut1_utc gets calculated when accessed directly, instead of failing and giving a rather obscure error message [#1925]
  • Fix a bug when computing the TDB to TT offset. The transform routine was using meters instead of kilometers for the Earth vector. [#1929]
  • Increase __array_priority__ so that TimeDelta can convert itself to a Quantity also in reverse operations [#1940]
  • Correct hop list from TCG to TDB to ensure that conversion is possible [#2074]

• astropy.units

  • Quantity initialisation rewritten for speed [#1775]
  • Fixed minor string formatting issue for dimensionless quantities. [#1772]
  • Fix error for inplace operations on non-contiguous quantities [#1834].
  • The definition of the unit bar has been corrected to "1e5 Pascal" from "100 Pascal" [#1910]
  • For units that are close to known units, but not quite, for example due to differences in case, the exception will now include recommendations. [#1870]
  • The generic and FITS unit parsers now accept multiple slashes in the unit string. There are multiple ways to interpret them, but the approach taken here is to convert "m/s/kg" to "m s-1 kg-1". Multiple slashes are accepted, but discouraged, by the FITS standard, due to the ambiguity of parsing, so a warning is raised when it is encountered. [#1911]
  • The use of "angstrom" (with a lower case "a") is now accepted in FITS unit strings, since it is in common usage. However, since it is not officially part of the FITS standard, a warning will be issued when it is encountered. [#1911]
  • Pickling unrecognized units will not raise a AttributeError. [#2047]
  • astropy.units now correctly preserves the precision of fractional powers. [#2070]
  • If a Unit or Quantity is raised to a floating point power that is very close to a rational number with a denominator less than or equal to 10, it is converted to a Fraction object to preserve its precision through complex unit conversion operations. [#2070]

• astropy.utils

  • Fixed crash in timer.RunTimePredictor.do_fit. [#1905]
  • Fixed astropy.utils.compat.argparse for Python 3.1. [#2017]

• astropy.wcs

  • astropy.wcs.WCS, astropy.wcs.WCS.fix and astropy.wcs.find_all_wcs now have a translate_units keyword argument that is passed down to astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.fix. This can be used to specify any unsafe translations of units from rarely used ones to more commonly used ones.

    Although "S" is commonly used to represent seconds, its translation to "s" is potentially unsafe since the standard recognizes "S" formally as Siemens, however rarely that may be used. The same applies to "H" for hours (Henry), and "D" for days (Debye).

    When these sorts of changes are performed, a warning is emitted. [#1854]

  • When a unit is "fixed" by astropy.wcs.WCS.fix or astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.unitfix, it now correctly reports the CUNIT field that was changed. [#1854]

  • astropy.wcs.Wcs.printwcs will no longer warn that cdelt is being ignored when none was present in the FITS file. [#1845]

  • astropy.wcs.Wcsprm.set is called from within the astropy.wcs.WCS constructor, therefore any invalid information in the keywords will be raised from the constructor, rather than on a subsequent call to a transformation method. [#1918]

  • Fix a memory corruption bug when using astropy.wcs.Wcs.sub with astropy.wcs.WCSSUB_CELESTIAL. [#1960]

  • Fixed the AttributeError exception that was raised when using astropy.wcs.WCS.footprint_to_file. [#1912]

  • Fixed a NameError exception that was raised when using astropy.wcs.validate or the wcslint script. [#2053]

  • Fixed a bug where named WCSes may be erroneously reported as ' ' when using astropy.wcs.validate or the wcslint script. [#2053]

  • Fixed a bug where error messages about incorrect header keywords may not be propagated correctly, resulting in a "NULL error object in wcslib" message. [#2106]

• Misc

  • There are a number of improvements to make Astropy work better on big endian platforms, such as MIPS, PPC, s390x and SPARC. [#1849]
  • The test suite will now raise exceptions when a deprecated feature of Python or Numpy is used. [#1948]

Other Changes and Additions

• A new function, astropy.wcs.get_include, has been added to get the location of the astropy.wcs C header files. [#1755]
• The doctests in the .rst files in the docs folder are now tested along with the other unit tests. This is in addition to the testing of doctests in docstrings that was already being performed. See docs/development/testguide.rst for more information. [#1771]
• Fix a problem where import fails on Python 3 if setup.py exists in current directory. [#1877]

0.3 (2013-11-20)

New Features

• General

  • A top-level configuration item, unicode_output has been added to control whether the Unicode string representation of certain objects will contain Unicode characters. For example, when use_unicode is False (default):

    >>> from astropy import units as u
    >>> print(unicode(u.degree))
    deg
    

    When use_unicode is True:

    >>> from astropy import units as u
    >>> print(unicode(u.degree))
    °
    

    See handling-unicode for more information. [#1441]

    • astropy.utils.misc.find_api_page is now imported into the top-level. This allows usage like astropy.find_api_page(astropy.units.Quantity). [#1779]

• astropy.convolution

  • New class-based system for generating kernels, replacing make_kernel. [#1255] The astropy.nddata.convolution sub-package has now been moved to astropy.convolution. [#1451]

• astropy.coordinates

  • Two classes astropy.coordinates.Longitude and astropy.coordinates.Latitude have been added. These are derived from the new Angle class and used for all longitude-like (RA, azimuth, galactic L) and latitude-like coordinates (Dec, elevation, galactic B) respectively. The Longitude class provides auto-wrapping capability and Latitude performs bounds checking.
  • astropy.coordinates.Distance supports conversion to and from distance modulii. [#1472]
  • astropy.coordinates.SphericalCoordinateBase and derived classes now support arrays of coordinates, enabling large speed-ups for some operations on multiple coordinates at the same time. These coordinates can also be indexed using standard slicing or any Numpy-compatible indexing. [#1535, #1615]
  • Array coordinates can be matched to other array coordinates, finding the closest matches between the two sets of coordinates (see the astropy.coordinates.matching.match_coordinates_3d and astropy.coordinates.matching.match_coordinates_sky functions). [#1535]

• astropy.cosmology

  • Added support for including massive Neutrinos in the cosmology classes. The Planck (2013) cosmology has been updated to use this. [#1364]
  • Calculations now use and return Quantity objects where appropriate. [#1237]

• astropy.io.ascii

  • Added support for writing IPAC format tables [#1152].

• astropy.io.fits

  • Added initial support for table columns containing pseudo-unsigned integers. This is currently enabled by using the uint=True option when opening files; any table columns with the correct BZERO value will be interpreted and returned as arrays of unsigned integers. [#906]
  • Upgraded vendored copy of CFITSIO to v3.35, though backwards compatibility back to version v3.28 is maintained.
  • Added support for reading and writing tables using the Q format for columns. The Q format is identical to the P format (variable-length arrays) except that it uses 64-bit integers for the data descriptors, allowing more than 4 GB of variable-length array data in a single table.
  • Some refactoring of the table and FITS_rec modules in order to better separate the details of the FITS binary and ASCII table data structures from the HDU data structures that encapsulate them. Most of these changes should not be apparent to users (but see API Changes below).

• astropy.io.votable

  • Updated to support the VOTable 1.3 draft. [#433]
  • Added the ability to look up and group elements by their utype attribute. [#622]
  • The format of the units of a VOTable file can be specified using the unit_format parameter. Note that units are still always written out using the CDS format, to ensure compatibility with the standard.

• astropy.modeling

  • Added a new framework for representing and evaluating mathematical models and for fitting data to models. See "What's New in Astropy 0.3" in the documentation for further details. [#493]

• astropy.stats

  • Added robust statistics functions astropy.stats.funcs.median_absolute_deviation, astropy.stats.funcs.biweight_location, and astropy.stats.funcs.biweight_midvariance. [#621]
  • Added astropy.stats.funcs.signal_to_noise_oir_ccd for computing the signal to noise ratio for source being observed in the optical/IR using a CCD. [#870]
  • Add axis=int option to stropy.stats.funcs.sigma_clip to allow clipping along a given axis for multidimensional data. [#1083]

• astropy.table

  • New columns can be added to a table via assignment to a non-existing column by name. [#726]
  • Added join function to perform a database-like join on two tables. This includes support for inner, left, right, and outer joins as well as metadata merging. [#903]
  • Added hstack and vstack functions to stack two or more tables. [#937]
  • Tables now have a .copy method and include support for copy and deepcopy. [#1208]
  • Added support for selecting and manipulating groups within a table with a database style group_by method. [#1424]
  • Table read and write functions now include rudimentary support reading and writing of FITS tables via the unified reading/writing interface. [#591]
  • The units and dtypes attributes and keyword arguments in Column, MaskedColumn, Row, and Table are now deprecated in favor of the single-tense unit and dtype. [#1174]
  • Setting a column from a Quantity now correctly sets the unit on the Column object. [#732]
  • Add remove_row and remove_rows to remove table rows. [#1230]
  • Added a new Table.show_in_browser method that opens a web browser and displays the table rendered as HTML. [#1342]
  • New tables can now be instantiated using a single row from an existing table. [#1417]

• astropy.time

  • New Time objects can be instantiated from existing Time objects (but with different format, scale, etc.) [#889]
  • Added a Time.now classmethod that returns the current UTC time, similarly to Python's datetime.now. [#1061]
  • Update internal time manipulations so that arithmetic with Time and TimeDelta objects maintains sub-nanosecond precision over a time span longer than the age of the universe. [#1189]
  • Use astropy.utils.iers to provide delta_ut1_utc, so that automatic calculation of UT1 becomes possible. [#1145]
  • Add datetime format which allows converting to and from standard library datetime.datetime objects. [#860]
  • Add plot_date format which allows converting to and from the date representation used when plotting dates with matplotlib via the matplotlib.pyplot.plot_date function. [#860]
  • Add gps format (seconds since 1980-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, including leap seconds) [#1164]
  • Add array indexing to Time objects [#1132]
  • Allow for arithmetic of multi-element and single-element Time and TimeDelta objects. [#1081]
  • Allow multiplication and division of TimeDelta objects by constants and arrays, as well as changing sign (negation) and taking the absolute value of TimeDelta objects. [#1082]
  • Allow comparisons of Time and TimeDelta objects. [#1171]
  • Support interaction of Time and Quantity objects that represent a time interval. [#1431]

• astropy.units

  • Added parallax equivalency for length-angle. [#985]
  • Added mass-energy equivalency. [#1333]
  • Added a new-style format method which will use format specifiers (like 0.03f) in new-style format strings for the Quantity's value. Specifiers which can't be applied to the value will fall back to the entire string representation of the quantity. [#1383]
  • Added support for complex number values in quantities. [#1384]
  • Added new spectroscopic equivalencies for velocity conversions (relativistic, optical, and radio conventions are supported) [#1200]
  • The spectral equivalency now also handles wave number.
  • The spectral_density equivalency now also accepts a Quantity for the frequency or wavelength. It also handles additional flux units.
  • Added Brightness Temperature (antenna gain) equivalency for conversion between T_B and flux density. [#1327]
  • Added percent unit, and allowed any string containing just a number to be interpreted as a scaled dimensionless unit. [#1409]
  • New-style format strings can be used to set the unit output format. For example, "{0:latex}".format(u.km) will print with the latex formatter. [#1462]
  • The Unit.is_equivalent method can now take a tuple. In this case, the method returns True if the unit is equivalent to any of the units listed in the tuple. [#1521]
  • def_unit can now take a 2-tuple of names of the form (short, long), where each entry is a list. This allows for handling strange units that might have multiple short names. [#1543]
  • Added dimensionless_angles equivalency, which allows conversion of any power of radian to dimensionless. [#1161]
  • Added the ability to enable set of units, or equivalencies that are used by default. Also provided context managers for these cases. [#1268]
  • Imperial units are disabled by default. [#1593, #1662]
  • Added an astropy.units.add_enabled_units context manager, which allows creating a temporary context with additional units temporarily enabled in the global units namespace. [#1662]
  • Unit instances now have .si and .cgs properties a la Quantity. These serve as shortcuts for Unit.to_system(cgs)[0] etc. [#1610]

• astropy.vo

  • New package added to support Virtual Observatory Simple Cone Search query and service validation. [#552]

• astropy.wcs

  • Fixed attribute error in astropy.wcs.Wcsprm (lattype->lattyp) [#1463]
  • Included a new command-line script called wcslint and accompanying API for validating the WCS in a given FITS file or header. [#580]
  • Upgraded included version of WCSLIB to 4.19.

• astropy.utils

  • Added a new set of utilities in astropy.utils.timer for analyzing the runtime of functions and making runtime predections for larger inputs. [#743]
  • ProgressBar and Spinner classes can now be used directly to return generator expressions. [#771]
  • Added astropy.utils.iers which allows reading in of IERS A or IERS B bulletins and interpolation in UT1-UTC.
  • Added a function astropy.utils.find_api_page--given a class or object from the astropy package, this will open that class's API documentation in a web browser. [#663]
  • Data download functions such as download_file now accept a show_progress argument to suppress console output, and a timeout argument. [#865, #1258]

• astropy.extern.six

  • Added six for python2/python3 compatibility

• Astropy now uses the ERFA library instead of the IAU SOFA library for fundamental time transformation routines. The ERFA library is derived, with permission, from the IAU SOFA library but is distributed under a BSD license. See license/ERFA.rst for details. [#1293]

• astropy.logger

  • The Astropy logger now no longer catches exceptions by default, and also only captures warnings emitted by Astropy itself (prior to this change, following an import of Astropy, any warning got re-directed through the Astropy logger). Logging to the Astropy log file has also been disabled by default. However, users of Astropy 0.2 will likely still see the previous behavior with Astropy 0.3 for exceptions and logging to file since the default configuration file installed by 0.2 set the exception logging to be on by default. To get the new behavior, set the log_exceptions and log_to_file configuration items to False in the astropy.cfg file. [#1331]

API Changes

• General

  • The configuration option utils.console.use_unicode has been moved to the top level and renamed to unicode_output. It now not only affects console widgets, such as progress bars, but also controls whether calling unicode on certain classes will return a string containing unicode characters.

• astropy.coordinates

  • The astropy.coordinates.Angle class is now a subclass of astropy.units.Quantity. This means it has all of the methods of a numpy.ndarray. [#1006]
  • The astropy.coordinates.Distance class is now a subclass of astropy.units.Quantity. This means it has all of the methods of a numpy.ndarray. [#1472]
    • All angular units are now supported, not just radian, degree and hour, but now arcsecond and arcminute as well. The object will retain its native unit, so when printing out a value initially provided in hours, its to_string() will, by default, also be expressed in hours.
    • The Angle class now supports arrays of angles.
    • To be consistent with units.Unit, Angle.format has been deprecated and renamed to Angle.to_string.
    • To be consistent with astropy.units, all plural forms of unit names have been removed. Therefore, the following properties of astropy.coordinates.Angle should be renamed:
      • radians -> radian
      • degrees -> degree
      • hours -> hour
    • Multiplication and division of two Angle objects used to raise NotImplementedError. Now they raise TypeError.
  • The astropy.coordinates.Angle class no longer has a bounds attribute so there is no bounds-checking or auto-wrapping at this level. This allows Angle objects to be used in arbitrary arithmetic expressions (e.g. coordinate distance computation).
  • The astropy.coordinates.RA and astropy.coordinates.Dec classes have been removed and replaced with astropy.coordinates.Longitude and astropy.coordinates.Latitude respectively. These are now used for the components of Galactic and Horizontal (Alt-Az) coordinates as well instead of plain Angle objects.
  • astropy.coordinates.angles.rotation_matrix and astropy.coordinates.angles.angle_axis now take a unit kwarg instead of degrees kwarg to specify the units of the angles. rotation_matrix will also take the unit from the given Angle object if no unit is provided.
  • The AngularSeparation class has been removed. The output of the coordinates separation() method is now an astropy.coordinates.Angle. [#1007]
  • The coordinate classes have been renamed in a way that remove the Coordinates at the end of the class names. E.g., ICRSCoordinates from previous versions is now called ICRS. [#1614]
  • HorizontalCoordinates are now named AltAz, to reflect more common terminology.

• astropy.cosmology

  • The Planck (2013) cosmology will likely give slightly different (and more accurate) results due to the inclusion of Neutrino masses. [#1364]
  • Cosmology class properties now return Quantity objects instead of simple floating-point values. [#1237]
  • The names of cosmology instances are now truly optional, and are set to None rather than the name of the class if the user does not provide them. [#1705]

• astropy.io.ascii

  • In the read method of astropy.io.ascii, empty column values in an ASCII table are now treated as missing values instead of the previous treatment as a zero-length string "". This now corresponds to the behavior of other table readers like numpy.genfromtxt. To restore the previous behavior set fill_values=None in the call to ascii.read(). [#919]
  • The read and write methods of astropy.io.ascii now have a format argument for specifying the file format. This is the preferred way to choose the format instead of the Reader and Writer arguments. [#961]
  • The include_names and exclude_names arguments were removed from the BaseHeader initializer, and now instead handled by the reader and writer classes directly. [#1350]
  • Allow numeric and otherwise unusual column names when reading a table where the format argument is specified, but other format details such as the delimiter or quote character are being guessed. [#1692]
  • When reading an ASCII table using the Table.read() method, the default has changed from guess=False to guess=True to allow auto-detection of file format. This matches the default behavior of ascii.read().

• astropy.io.fits

  • The astropy.io.fits.new_table function is marked "pending deprecation". This does not mean it will be removed outright or that its functionality has changed. It will likely be replaced in the future for a function with similar, if not subtly different functionality. A better, if not slightly more verbose approach is to use pyfits.FITS_rec.from_columns to create a new FITS_rec table--this has the same interface as pyfits.new_table. The difference is that it returns a plan FITS_rec array, and not an HDU instance. This FITS_rec object can then be used as the data argument in the constructors for BinTableHDU (for binary tables) or TableHDU (for ASCII tables). This is analogous to creating an ImageHDU by passing in an image array. pyfits.FITS_rec.from_columns is just a simpler way of creating a FITS-compatible recarray from a FITS column specification.
  • The updateHeader, updateHeaderData, and updateCompressedData methods of the CompDataHDU class are pending deprecation and moved to internal methods. The operation of these methods depended too much on internal state to be used safely by users; instead they are invoked automatically in the appropriate places when reading/writing compressed image HDUs.
  • The CompDataHDU.compData attribute is pending deprecation in favor of the clearer and more PEP-8 compatible CompDataHDU.compressed_data.
  • The constructor for CompDataHDU has been changed to accept new keyword arguments. The new keyword arguments are essentially the same, but are in underscore_separated format rather than camelCase format. The old arguments are still pending deprecation.
  • The internal attributes of HDU classes _hdrLoc, _datLoc, and _datSpan have been replaced with _header_offset, _data_offset, and _data_size respectively. The old attribute names are still pending deprecation. This should only be of interest to advanced users who have created their own HDU subclasses.
  • The following previously deprecated functions and methods have been removed entirely: createCard, createCardFromString, upperKey, ColDefs.data, setExtensionNameCaseSensitive, _File.getfile, _TableBaseHDU.get_coldefs, Header.has_key, Header.ascardlist.
  • Interfaces that were pending deprecation are now fully deprecated. These include: create_card, create_card_from_string, upper_key, Header.get_history, and Header.get_comment.
  • The .name attribute on HDUs is now directly tied to the HDU's header, so that if .header['EXTNAME'] changes so does .name and vice-versa.

• astropy.io.registry

  • Identifier functions for reading/writing Table and NDData objects should now accept (origin, *args, **kwargs) instead of (origin, args, kwargs). [#591]
  • Added a new astropy.io.registry.get_formats function for listing registered I/O formats and details about the their readers/writers. [#1669]

• astropy.io.votable

  • Added a new option use_names_over_ids option to use when converting from VOTable objects to Astropy Tables. This can prevent a situation where column names are not preserved when converting from a VOTable. [#609]

• astropy.nddata

  • The astropy.nddata.convolution sub-package has now been moved to astropy.convolution, and the make_kernel function has been removed. (the kernel classes should be used instead) [#1451]

• astropy.stats.funcs

  • For sigma_clip, the maout optional parameter has been removed, and the function now always returns a masked array. A new boolean parameter copy can be used to indicated whether the input data should be copied (copy=True, default) or used by reference (copy=False) in the output masked array. [#1083]

• astropy.table

  • The first argument to the Column and MaskedColumn classes is now the data array--the name argument has been changed to an optional keyword argument. [#840]
  • Added support for instantiating a Table from a list of dict, each one representing a single row with the keys mapping to column names. [#901]
  • The plural 'units' and 'dtypes' have been switched to 'unit' and 'dtype' where appropriate. The original attributes are still present in this version as deprecated attributes, but will be removed in the next version. [#1174]
  • The copy methods of Column and MaskedColumn were changed so that the first argument is now order='C'. This is required for compatibility with Numpy 1.8 which is currently in development. [#1250]
  • Comparing a column (with == or !=) to a scalar, an array, or another column now always returns a boolean Numpy array (which is a masked array if either of the arguments in the comparison was masked). This is in contrast to the previous behavior, which in some cases returned a boolean Numpy array, and in some cases returned a boolean Column object. [#1446]

• astropy.time

  • For consistency with Quantity, the attributes val and is_scalar have been renamed to value and isscalar, respectively, and the attribute vals has been dropped. [#767]
  • The double-float64 internal representation of time is used more efficiently to enable better accuracy. [#366]
  • Format and scale arguments are now allowed to be case-insensitive. [#1128]

• astropy.units

  • The Quantity class now inherits from the Numpy array class, and includes the following API changes [#929]:
    • Using float(...), int(...), and long(...) on a quantity will now only work if the quantity is dimensionless and unscaled.
    • All Numpy ufuncs should now treat units correctly (or raise an exception if not supported), rather than extract the value of quantities and operate on this, emitting a warning about the implicit loss of units.
    • When using relevant Numpy ufuncs on dimensionless quantities (e.g. np.exp(h * nu / (k_B * T))), or combining dimensionless quantities with Python scalars or plain Numpy arrays 1 + v / c, the dimensionless Quantity will automatically be converted to an unscaled dimensionless Quantity.
    • When initializing a quantity from a value with no unit, it is now set to be dimensionless and unscaled by default. When initializing a Quantity from another Quantity and with no unit specified in the initializer, the unit is now taken from the unit of the Quantity being initialized from.
  • Strings are no longer allowed as the values for Quantities. [#1005]
  • Quantities are always comparable with zero regardless of their units. [#1254]
  • The exception astropy.units.UnitsException has been renamed to astropy.units.UnitsError to be more consistent with the naming of built-in Python exceptions. [#1406]
  • Multiplication with and division by a string now always returns a Unit (rather than a Quantity when the string was first) [#1408]
  • Imperial units are disabled by default.

• astropy.wcs

  • For those including the astropy.wcs C headers in their project, they should now include it as:

    #include "astropy_wcs/astropy_wcs_api.h"

    instead of:

    #include "astropy_wcs_api.h"

    [#1631]

• The --enable-legacy option for setup.py has been removed. [#1493]

Bug Fixes

• astropy.io.ascii
  • The write() function was ignoring the fill_values argument. [#910]
  • Fixed an issue in DefaultSplitter.join where the delimiter attribute was ignored when writing the CSV. [#1020]
  • Fixed writing of IPAC tables containing null values. [#1366]
  • When a table with no header row was read without specifying the format and using the names argument, then the first row could be dropped. [#1692]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Binary tables containing compressed images may, optionally, contain other columns unrelated to the tile compression convention. Although this is an uncommon use case, it is permitted by the standard.
  • Reworked some of the file I/O routines to allow simpler, more consistent mapping between OS-level file modes ('rb', 'wb', 'ab', etc.) and the more "PyFITS-specific" modes used by PyFITS like "readonly" and "update". That is, if reading a FITS file from an open file object, it doesn't matter as much what "mode" it was opened in so long as it has the right capabilities (read/write/etc.) Also works around bugs in the Python io module in 2.6+ with regard to file modes.
  • Fixed a long-standing issue where writing binary tables did not correctly write the TFORMn keywords for variable-length array columns (they omitted the max array length parameter of the format). This was thought fixed in an earlier version, but it was only fixed for compressed image HDUs and not for binary tables in general.
• astropy.nddata
  • Fixed crash when trying to multiple or divide NDData objects with uncertainties. [#1547]
• astropy.table
  • Using a list of strings to index a table now correctly returns a new table with the columns named in the list. [#1454]
  • Inequality operators now work properly with Column objects. [#1685]
• astropy.time
  • Time scale and format attributes are now shown when calling dir() on a Time object. [#1130]
• astropy.wcs
  • Fixed assignment to string-like WCS attributes on Python 3. [#956]
• astropy.units
  • Fixed a bug that caused the order of multiplication/division of plain Numpy arrays with Quantities to matter (i.e. if the plain array comes first the units were not preserved in the output). [#899]
  • Directly instantiated CompositeUnits were made printable without crashing. [#1576]
• Misc
  • Fixed various modules that hard-coded sys.stdout as default arguments to functions at import time, rather than using the runtime value of sys.stdout. [#1648]
  • Minor documentation fixes and enhancements [#922, #1034, #1210, #1217, #1491, #1492, #1498, #1582, #1608, #1621, #1646, #1670, #1756]
  • Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when running the test suite on systems with platform names containing non-ASCII characters. [#1698]

Other Changes and Additions

• General
  • Astropy now follows the PSF Code of Conduct. [#1216]
  • Astropy's test suite now tests all doctests in inline docstrings. Support for running doctests in the reST documentation is planned to follow in v0.3.1.
  • Astropy's test suite can be run on multiple CPUs in parallel, often greatly improving runtime, using the --parallel option. [#1040]
  • A warning is now issued when using Astropy with Numpy < 1.5--much of Astropy may still work in this case but it shouldn't be expected to either. [#1479]
  • Added automatic download/build/installation of Numpy during Astropy installation if not already found. [#1483]
  • Handling of metadata for the NDData and Table classes has been unified by way of a common MetaData descriptor--it allows instantiating an object with metadata of any mapping type, and subsequently prevents replacing the mapping stored in the .meta attribute (only direct updates to that object are allowed). [#1686]
• astropy.coordinates
  • Angles containing out of bounds minutes or seconds (e.g. 60) can be parsed--the value modulo 60 is used with carry to the hours/minutes, and a warning is issued rather than raising an exception. [#990]
• astropy.io.fits
  • The new compression code also adds support for the ZQUANTIZ and ZDITHER0 keywords added in more recent versions of this FITS Tile Compression spec. This includes support for lossless compression with GZIP. (#198) By default no dithering is used, but the SUBTRACTIVE_DITHER_1 and SUBTRACTIVE_DITHER_2 methods can be enabled by passing the correct constants to the quantize_method argument to the CompImageHDU constructor. A seed can be manually specified, or automatically generated using either the system clock or checksum-based methods via the dither_seed argument. See the documentation for CompImageHDU for more details.
  • Images compressed with the Tile Compression standard can now be larger than 4 GB through support of the Q format.
  • All HDUs now have a .ver .level attribute that returns the value of the EXTVAL and EXTLEVEL keywords from that HDU's header, if the exist. This was added for consistency with the .name attribute which returns the EXTNAME value from the header.
  • Then Column and ColDefs classes have new .dtype attributes which give the Numpy dtype for the column data in the first case, and the full Numpy compound dtype for each table row in the latter case.
  • There was an issue where new tables created defaulted the values in all string columns to '0.0'. Now string columns are filled with empty strings by default--this seems a less surprising default, but it may cause differences with tables created with older versions of PyFITS or Astropy.
• astropy.io.misc
  • The HDF5 reader can now refer to groups in the path as well as datasets; if given a group, the first dataset in that group is read. [#1159]
• astropy.nddata
  • NDData objects have more helpful, though still rudimentary __str__` and ``__repr__ displays. [#1313]
• astropy.units
  • Added 'cycle' unit. [#1160]
  • Extended units supported by the CDS formatter/parser. [#1468]
  • Added unicode an LaTeX symbols for liter. [#1618]
• astropy.wcs
  • Redundant SCAMP distortion parameters are removed with SIP distortions are also present. [#1278]
  • Added iterative implementation of all_world2pix that can be reliably inverted. [#1281]

0.2.5 (2013-10-25)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.coordinates
  • Fixed incorrect string formatting of Angles using precision=0. [#1319]
  • Fixed string formatting of Angles using decimal=True which ignored the precision argument. [#1323]
  • Fixed parsing of format strings using appropriate unicode characters instead of the ASCII - for minus signs. [#1429]
• astropy.io.ascii
  • Fixed a crash in the IPAC table reader when the include/exclude_names option is set. [#1348]
  • Fixed writing AASTex tables to honor the tabletype option. [#1372]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Improved round-tripping and preservation of manually assigned column attributes (TNULLn, TSCALn, etc.) in table HDU headers. (Note: This issue was previously reported as fixed in Astropy v0.2.2 by mistake; it is not fixed until v0.3.) [#996]
  • Fixed a bug that could cause a segfault when trying to decompress an compressed HDU whose contents are truncated (due to a corrupt file, for example). This still causes a Python traceback but better that than a segfault. [#1332]
  • Newly created CompImageHDU HDUs use the correct value of the DEFAULT_COMPRESSION_TYPE module-level constant instead of hard-coding "RICE_1" in the header.
  • Fixed a corner case where when extra memory is allocated to compress an image, it could lead to unnecessary in-memory copying of the compressed image data and a possible memory leak through Numpy.
  • Fixed a bug where assigning from an mmap'd array in one FITS file over the old (also mmap'd) array in another FITS file failed to update the destination file. Corresponds to PyFITS issue 25.
  • Some miscellaneous documentation fixes.
• astropy.io.votable
  • Added a warning for when a VOTable 1.2 file contains no RESOURCES elements (at least one should be present). [#1337]
  • Fixed a test failure specific to MIPS architecture caused by an errant floating point warning. [#1179]
• astropy.nddata.convolution
  • Prevented in-place modification of the input arrays to convolve(). [#1153]
• astropy.table
  • Added HTML escaping for string values in tables when outputting the table as HTML. [#1347]
  • Added a workaround in a bug in Numpy that could cause a crash when accessing a table row in a masked table containing dtype=object columns. [#1229]
  • Fixed an issue similar to the one in #1229, but specific to unmasked tables. [#1403]
• astropy.units
  • Improved error handling for unparseable units and fixed parsing CDS units without mantissas in the exponent. [#1288]
  • Added a physical type for spectral flux density. [#1410]
  • Normalized conversions that should result in a scale of exactly 1.0 to round off slight floating point imprecisions. [#1407]
  • Added support in the CDS unit parser/formatter for unusual unit prefixes that are nonetheless required to be supported by that convention. [#1426]
  • Fixed the parsing of sqrt() in unit format strings which was returning unit ** 2 instead of unit ** 0.5. [#1458]
• astropy.wcs
  • When passing a single array to the wcs transformation functions, (astropy.wcs.Wcs.all_pix2world, etc.), its second dimension must now exactly match the number of dimensions in the transformation. [#1395]
  • Improved error message when incorrect arguments are passed to WCS.wcs_world2pix. [#1394]
  • Fixed a crash when trying to read WCS from FITS headers on Python 3.3 in Windows. [#1363]
  • Only headers that are required as part of the WCSLIB C API are installed by the package, per request of system packagers. [#1666]
• Misc
  • Fixed crash when the COLUMNS environment variable is set to a non-integer value. [#1291]
  • Fixed a bug in ProgressBar.map where multiprocess=True could cause it to hang on waiting for the process pool to be destroyed. [#1381]
  • Fixed a crash on Python 3.2 when affiliated packages try to use the astropy.utils.data.get_pkg_data_* functions. [#1256]
  • Fixed a minor path normalization issue that could occur on Windows in astropy.utils.data.get_pkg_data_filename. [#1444]
  • Fixed an annoyance where configuration items intended only for testing showed up in users' astropy.cfg files. [#1477]
  • Prevented crashes in exception logging in unusual cases where no traceback is associated with the exception. [#1518]
  • Fixed a crash when running the tests in unusual environments where sys.stdout.encoding is None. [#1530]
  • Miscellaneous documentation fixes and improvements [#1308, #1317, #1377, #1393, #1362, #1516]

Other Changes and Additions

• Astropy installation now requests setuptools >= 0.7 during build/installation if neither distribute or setuptools >= 0.7 is already installed. In other words, if import setuptools fails, ez_setup.py is used to bootstrap the latest setuptools (rather than using distribute_setup.py to bootstrap the now obsolete distribute package). [#1197]
• When importing Astropy from a source checkout without having built the extension modules first an ImportError is raised rather than a SystemExit exception. [#1269]

0.2.4 (2013-07-24)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.coordinates
  • Fixed the angle parser to support parsing the string "1 degree". [#1168]
• astropy.cosmology
  • Fixed a crash in the comoving_volume method on non-flat cosmologies when passing it an array of redshifts.
• astropy.io.ascii
  • Fixed a bug that prevented saving changes to the comment symbol when writing changes to a table. [#1167]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Added a workaround for a bug in 64-bit OSX that could cause truncation when writing files greater than 2^32 bytes in size. [#839]
• astropy.io.votable
  • Fixed incorrect reading of tables containing multiple <RESOURCE> elements. [#1223]
• astropy.table
  • Fixed a bug where Table.remove_column and Table.rename_column could cause a masked table to lose its masking. [#1120]
  • Fixed bugs where subclasses of Table did not preserver their class in certain operations. [#1142]
  • Fixed a bug where slicing a masked table did not preserve the mask. [#1187]
• astropy.units
  • Fixed a bug where the .si and .cgs properties of dimensionless Quantity objects raised a ZeroDivisionError. [#1150]
  • Fixed a bug where multiple subsequent calls to the .decompose() method on array quantities applied a scale factor each time. [#1163]
• Misc
  • Fixed an installation crash that could occur sometimes on Debian/Ubuntu and other *NIX systems where pkg_resources can be installed without installing setuptools. [#1150]
  • Updated the distribute_setup.py bootstrapper to use setuptools >= 0.7 when installing on systems that don't already have an up to date version of distribute/setuptools. [#1180]
  • Changed the version.py template so that Astropy affiliated packages can (and they should) use their own cython_version.py and utils._compiler modules where appropriate. This issue only pertains to affiliated package maintainers. [#1198]
  • Fixed a corner case where the default config file generation could crash if building with matplotlib but not Sphinx installed in a virtualenv. [#1225]
  • Fixed a crash that could occur in the logging module on systems that don't have a default preferred encoding (in particular this happened in some versions of PyCharm). [#1244]
  • The Astropy log now supports passing non-string objects (and calling str() on them by default) to the logging methods, in line with Python's standard logging API. [#1267]
  • Minor documentation fixes [#582, #696, #1154, #1194, #1212, #1213, #1246, #1252]

Other Changes and Additions

• astropy.cosmology
  • Added a new Plank13 object representing the Plank 2013 results. [#895]
• astropy.units
  • Performance improvements in initialization of Quantity objects with a large number of elements. [#1231]

0.2.3 (2013-05-30)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.time
  • Fixed inaccurate handling of leap seconds when converting from UTC to UNIX timestamps. [#1118]
  • Tightened required accuracy in many of the time conversion tests. [#1121]
• Misc
  • Fixed a regression that was introduced in v0.2.2 by the fix to issue #992 that was preventing installation of Astropy affiliated packages that use Astropy's setup framework. [#1124]

0.2.2 (2013-05-21)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.io
  • Fixed issues in both the fits and votable sub-packages where array byte order was not being handled consistently, leading to possible crashes especially on big-endian systems. [#1003]
• astropy.io.fits
  • When an error occurs opening a file in fitsdiff the exception message will now at least mention which file had the error.
  • Fixed a couple cases where creating a new table using TDIMn in some of the columns could cause a crash.
  • Slightly refactored how tables containing variable-length array columns are handled to add two improvements: Fixes an issue where accessing the data after a call to the astropy.io.fits.getdata convenience function caused an exception, and allows the VLA data to be read from an existing mmap of the FITS file.
  • Fixed a bug on Python 3 where attempting to open a non-existent file on Python 3 caused a seemingly unrelated traceback.
  • Fixed an issue in the tests that caused some tests to fail if Astropy is installed with read-only permissions.
  • Fixed a bug where instantiating a BinTableHDU from a numpy array containing boolean fields converted all the values to False.
  • Fixed an issue where passing an array of integers into the constructor of Column() when the column type is floats of the same byte width caused the column array to become garbled.
  • Fixed inconsistent behavior in creating CONTINUE cards from byte strings versus unicode strings in Python 2--CONTINUE cards can now be created properly from unicode strings (so long as they are convertable to ASCII).
  • Fixed a bug in parsing HIERARCH keywords that do not have a space after the first equals sign (before the value).
  • Prevented extra leading whitespace on HIERARCH keywords from being treated as part of the keyword.
  • Fixed a bug where HIERARCH keywords containing lower-case letters was mistakenly marked as invalid during header validation along with an ancillary issue where the Header.index() method id not work correctly with HIERARCH keywords containing lower-case letters.
  • Disallowed assigning NaN and Inf floating point values as header values, since the FITS standard does not define a way to represent them in. Because this is undefined, the previous behavior did not make sense and produced invalid FITS files. [#954]
  • Fixed an obscure issue that can occur on systems that don't have flush to memory-mapped files implemented (namely GNU Hurd). [#968]
• astropy.io.votable
  • Stopped deprecation warnings from the astropy.io.votable package that could occur during setup. [#970]
  • Fixed an issue where INFO elements were being incorrectly dropped when occurring inside a TABLE element. [#1000]
  • Fixed obscure test failures on MIPS platforms. [#1010]
• astropy.nddata.convolution
  • Fixed an issue in make_kernel() when using an Airy function kernel. Also removed the superfluous 'brickwall' option. [#939]
• astropy.table
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when adding a row to an empty (rowless) table with masked columns. [#973]
  • Made it possible to assign to one table row from the value of another row, effectively making it easier to copy rows, for example. [#1019]
• astropy.time
  • Added appropriate __copy__ and __deepcopy__ behavior; this omission caused a seemingly unrelated error in FK5 coordinate separation. [#891]
• astropy.units
  • Fixed an issue where the isiterable() utility returned True for quantities with scalar values. Added an __iter__ method for the Quantity class and fixed isiterable() to catch false positives. [#878]
  • Fixed previously undefined behavior when multiplying a unit by a string. [#949]
  • Added 'time' as a physical type--this was a simple omission. [#959]
  • Fixed issues with pickling unit objects so as to play nicer with the multiprocessing module. [#974]
  • Made it more difficult to accidentally override existing units with a new unit of the same name. [#1070]
  • Added several more physical types and units that were previously omitted, including 'mass density', 'specific volume', 'molar volume', 'momentum', 'angular momentum', 'angular speed', 'angular acceleration', 'electric current', 'electric current density', 'electric field strength', 'electric flux density', 'electric charge density', 'permittivity', 'electromagnetic field strength', 'radiant intensity', 'data quantity', 'bandwidth'; and 'knots', 'nautical miles', 'becquerels', and 'curies' respectively. [#1072]
• Misc
  • Fixed a permission error that could occur when running astropy.test() on Python 3 when Astropy is installed as root. [#811]
  • Made it easier to filter warnings from the convolve() function and from Quantity objects. [#853]
  • Fixed a crash that could occur in Python 3 when generation of the default config file fails during setup. [#952]
  • Fixed an unrelated error message that could occur when trying to import astropy from a source checkout without having build the extension modules first. This issue was claimed to be fixed in v0.2.1, but the fix itself had a bug. [#971]
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when running the build_sphinx setup command in Python 3. [#977]
  • Added a more helpful error message when trying to run the setup.py build_sphinx command when Sphinx is not installed. [#1027]
  • Minor documentation fixes and restructuring. [#935, #967, #978, #1004, #1028, #1047]

Other Changes and Additions

• Some performance improvements to the astropy.units package, in particular improving the time it takes to import the sub-package. [#1015]

0.2.1 (2013-04-03)

Bug Fixes

• astropy.coordinates
  • Fixed encoding errors that could occur when formatting coordinate objects in code using from __future__ import unicode_literals. [#817]
  • Fixed a bug where the minus sign was dropped when string formatting dms coordinates with -0 degrees. [#875]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Properly supports the ZQUANTIZ keyword used to support quantization level--this includes working support for lossless GZIP compression of images.
  • Fixed support for opening gzipped FITS files in a writeable mode. [#256]
  • Added a more helpful exception message when trying to read invalid values from a table when the required TNULLn keyword is missing. [#309]
  • More refactoring of the tile compression handling to work around a potential memory access violation that was particularly prevalent on Windows. [#507]
  • Fixed an integer size mismatch in the compression module that could affect 32-bit systems. [#786]
  • Fixed malformatting of the TFORMn keywords when writing compressed image tables (they omitted the max array length parameter from the variable-length array format).
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when writing a table containing multi- dimensional array columns from an existing file into a new file.
  • Fixed a bug in fitsdiff that reported two header keywords containing NaN as having different values.
• astropy.io.votable
  • Fixed links to the astropy.io.votable documentation in the VOTable validator output. [#806]
  • When reading VOTables containing integers that are out of range for their column type, display a warning rather than raising an exception. [#825]
  • Changed the default string format for floating point values for better round-tripping. [#856]
  • Fixed opening VOTables through the Table.read() interface for tables that have no names. [#927]
  • Fixed creation of VOTables from an Astropy table that does not have a data mask. [#928]
  • Minor documentation fixes. [#932]
• astropy.nddata.convolution
  • Added better handling of inf values to the convolve_fft family of functions. [#893]
• astropy.table
  • Fixed silent failure to assign values to a row on multiple columns. [#764]
  • Fixed various buggy behavior when viewing a table after sorting by one of its columns. [#829]
  • Fixed using numpy.where() with table indexing. [#838]
  • Fixed a bug where opening a remote table with Table.read() could cause the entire table to be downloaded twice. [#845]
  • Fixed a bug where MaskedColumn no longer worked if the column being masked is renamed. [#916]
• astropy.units
  • Added missing capability for array Quantitys to be initializable by a list of Quantitys. [#835]
  • Fixed the definition of year and lightyear to be in terms of Julian year per the IAU definition. [#861]
  • "degree" was removed from the list of SI base units. [#863]
• astropy.wcs
  • Fixed TypeError when calling WCS.to_header_string(). [#822]
  • Added new method WCS.all_world2pix for converting from world coordinates to pixel space, including inversion of the astrometric distortion correction. [#1066, #1281]
• Misc
  • Fixed a minor issue when installing with ./setup.py develop on a fresh git clone. This is likely only of interest to developers on Astropy. [#725]
  • Fixes a crash with ImportError: No module named 'astropy.version' when running setup.py from a source checkout for the first time on OSX with Python 3.3. [#820]
  • Fixed an installation issue where running ./setup.py install or when installing with pip the .astropy directory gets created in the home directory of the user running the command. The user's .astropy directory should only be created when they use Astropy, not when they install it. [#867]
  • Fixed an exception when creating a ProgressBar with a "total" of 0. [#752]
  • Added better documentation of behavior that can occur when trying to import the astropy package from within a source checkout without first building the extension modules. [#795, #864]
  • Added link to the installation instructions in the README. [#797]
  • Catches segfaults in xmllint which can occur sometimes and is otherwise out of our control. [#803]
  • Minor changes to the documentation template. [#805]
  • Fixed a minor exception handling bug in download_file(). [#808]
  • Added cleanup of any temporary files if an error occurs in download_file(). [#857]
  • Filesystem free space is checked for before attempting to download a file with download_file(). [#858]
  • Fixed package data locating to work across symlinks--required to work with some OS packaging layouts. [#827]
  • Fixed a bug when building Cython extensions where hidden files containing .pyx extensions could cause the build to crash. This can be an issue with software and filesystems that autogenerate hidden files. [#834]
  • Fixed bug that could cause a "script" called README.rst to be installed in a bin directory. [#852]
  • Fixed some miscellaneous and mostly rare reference leaks caught by cpychecker. [#914]

Other Changes and Additions

• Added logo and branding for Windows binary installers. [#741]
• Upgraded included version libexpat to 2.1.0. [#781]
• ~25% performance improvement in unit composition/decomposition. [#836]
• Added previously missing LaTeX formatting for L_sun and R_sun. [#841]
• ConfigurationItems now have a more useful and informative __repr__ and improved documentation for how to use them. [#855]
• Added a friendlier error message when trying to import astropy from a source checkout without first building the extension modules inplace. [#864]
• py.test now outputs more system information for help in debugging issues from users. [#869]
• Added unit definitions "mas" and "uas" for "milliarcsecond" and "microarcsecond" respectively. [#892]

0.2 (2013-02-19)

New Features

This is a brief overview of the new features included in Astropy 0.2--please see the "What's New" section of the documentation for more details.

• astropy.coordinates

  • This new subpackage contains a representation of celestial coordinates, and provides a wide range of related functionality. While fully-functional, it is a work in progress and parts of the API may change in subsequent releases.

• astropy.cosmology

  • Update to include cosmologies with variable dark energy equations of state. (This introduces some API incompatibilities with the older Cosmology objects).
  • Added parameters for relativistic species (photons, neutrinos) to the astropy.cosmology classes. The current treatment assumes that neutrinos are massless. [#365]
  • Add a WMAP9 object using the final (9-year) WMAP parameters from Hinshaw et al. 2013. It has also been made the default cosmology. [#629, #724]

• astropy.table I/O infrastructure for custom readers/writers implemented. [#305]

  • Added support for reading/writing HDF5 files [#461]
  • Added support for masked tables with missing or invalid data [#451]

• New astropy.time sub-package. [#332]

• New astropy.units sub-package that includes a class for units (astropy.units.Unit) and scalar quantities that have units (astropy.units.Quantity). [#370, #445]

  This has the following effects on other sub-packages:

  • In astropy.wcs, the wcs.cunit list now takes and returns astropy.units.Unit objects. [#379]
  • In astropy.nddata, units are now stored as astropy.units.Unit objects. [#382]
  • In astropy.table, units on columns are now stored as astropy.units.Unit objects. [#380]
  • In astropy.constants, constants are now stored as astropy.units.Quantity objects. [#529]

• astropy.io.ascii

  • Improved integration with the astropy.table Table class so that table and column metadata (e.g. keywords, units, description, formatting) are directly available in the output table object. The CDS, DAOphot, and IPAC format readers now provide this type of integrated metadata.
  • Changed to using astropy.table masked tables instead of NumPy masked arrays for tables with missing values.
  • Added SExtractor table reader to astropy.io.ascii [#420]
  • Removed the Memory reader class which was used to convert data input passed to the write function into an internal table. Instead write instantiates an astropy Table object using the data input to write.
  • Removed the NumpyOutputter as the output of reading a table is now always a Table object.
  • Removed the option of supplying a function as a column output formatter.
  • Added a new strip_whitespace keyword argument to the write function. This controls whether whitespace is stripped from the left and right sides of table elements before writing. Default is True.
  • Fixed a bug in reading IPAC tables with null values.

• Generalized I/O infrastructure so that astropy.nddata can also have custom readers/writers [#659]

• astropy.wcs

  • From updating the underlying wcslib 4.16:
    • When astropy.wcs.WCS constructs a default coordinate representation it will give it the special name "DEFAULTS", and will not report "Found one coordinate representation".

Other Changes and Additions

• A configuration file with all options set to their defaults is now generated when astropy is installed. This file will be pulled in as the users' astropy configuration file the first time they import astropy. [#498]
• Astropy doc themes moved into astropy.sphinx to allow affiliated packages to access them.
• Added expanded documentation for the astropy.cosmology sub-package. [#272]
• Added option to disable building of "legacy" packages (pyfits, vo, etc.).
• The value of the astronomical unit (au) has been updated to that adopted by IAU 2012 Resolution B2, and the values of the pc and kpc constants have been updated to reflect this. [#368]
• Added links to the documentation pages to directly edit the documentation on GitHub. [#347]
• Several updates merged from pywcs into astropy.wcs [#384]:
  • Improved the reading of distortion images.
  • Added a new option to choose whether or not to write SIP coefficients.
  • Uses the relax option by default so that non-standard keywords are allowed. [#585]
• Added HTML representation of tables in IPython notebook [#409]
• Rewrote CFITSIO-based backend for handling tile compression of FITS files. It now uses a standard CFITSIO instead of heavily modified pieces of CFITSIO as before. Astropy ships with its own copy of CFITSIO v3.30, but system packagers may choose instead to strip this out in favor of a system-installed version of CFITSIO. This corresponds to PyFITS ticket 169. [#318]
• Moved astropy.config.data to astropy.utils.data and re-factored the I/O routines to separate out the generic I/O code that can be used to open any file or resource from the code used to access Astropy-related data. The 'core' I/O routine is now get_readable_fileobj, which can be used to access any local as well as remote data, supports caching, and can decompress gzip and bzip2 files on-the-fly. [#425]
• Added a classmethod to astropy.coordinates.coordsystems.SphericalCoordinatesBase that performs a name resolve query using Sesame to retrieve coordinates for the requested object. This works for any subclass of SphericalCoordinatesBase, but requires an internet connection. [#556]
• astropy.nddata.convolution removed requirement of PyFFTW3; uses Numpy's FFT by default instead with the added ability to specify an FFT implementation to use. [#660]

Bug Fixes

• astropy.io.ascii
  • Fixed crash when pprinting a row with INDEF values. [#511]
  • Fixed failure when reading DAOphot files with empty keyword values. [#666]
• astropy.io.fits
  • Improved handling of scaled images and pseudo-unsigned integer images in compressed image HDUs. They now work more transparently like normal image HDUs with support for the do_not_scale_image_data and uint options, as well as scale_back and save_backup. The .scale() method works better too. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 88.
  • Permits non-string values for the EXTNAME keyword when reading in a file, rather than throwing an exception due to the malformatting. Added verification for the format of the EXTNAME keyword when writing. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 96.
  • Added support for EXTNAME and EXTVER in PRIMARY HDUs. That is, if EXTNAME is specified in the header, it will also be reflected in the .name attribute and in fits.info(). These keywords used to be verboten in PRIMARY HDUs, but the latest version of the FITS standard allows them. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 151.
  • HCOMPRESS can again be used to compress data cubes (and higher-dimensional arrays) so long as the tile size is effectively 2-dimensional. In fact, compatible tile sizes will automatically be used even if they're not explicitly specified. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 171.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause a deadlock in the filesystem on OSX when reading the data from certain types of FITS files. This only occurred when used in conjunction with Numpy 1.7. [#369]
  • Added support for the optional endcard parameter in the Header.fromtextfile() and Header.totextfile() methods. Although endcard=False was a reasonable default assumption, there are still text dumps of FITS headers that include the END card, so this should have been more flexible. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 176.
  • Fixed a crash when running fitsdiff on two empty (that is, zero row) tables. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 178.
  • Fixed an issue where opening a FITS file containing a random group HDU in update mode could result in an unnecessary rewriting of the file even if no changes were made. This corresponds to PyFITS ticket 179.
  • Fixed a crash when generating diff reports from diffs using the ignore_comments options. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 181.
  • Fixed some bugs with WCS distortion paper record-valued keyword cards:
    • Cards that looked kind of like RVKCs but were not intended to be were over-permissively treated as such--commentary keywords like COMMENT and HISTORY were particularly affected. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 183.
    • Looking up a card in a header by its standard FITS keyword only should always return the raw value of that card. That way cards containing values that happen to valid RVKCs but were not intended to be will still be treated like normal cards. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 184.
    • Looking up a RVKC in a header with only part of the field-specifier (for example "DP1.AXIS" instead of "DP1.AXIS.1") was implicitly treated as a wildcard lookup. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 184.
  • Fixed a crash when diffing two FITS files where at least one contains a compressed image HDU which was not recognized as an image instead of a table. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 187.
  • Fixed a bug where opening a file containing compressed image HDUs in 'update' mode and then immediately closing it without making any changes caused the file to be rewritten unnecessarily.
  • Fixed two memory leaks that could occur when writing compressed image data, or in some cases when opening files containing compressed image HDUs in 'update' mode.
  • Fixed a bug where ImageHDU.scale(option='old') wasn't working at all--it was not restoring the image to its original BSCALE and BZERO values.
  • Fixed a bug when writing out files containing zero-width table columns, where the TFIELDS keyword would be updated incorrectly, leaving the table largely unreadable.
  • Fixed a minor string formatting issue.
  • Fixed bugs in the backwards compatibility layer for the CardList.index and CardList.count methods. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 190.
  • Improved __repr__ and text file representation of cards with long values that are split into CONTINUE cards. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 193.
  • Fixed a crash when trying to assign a long (> 72 character) value to blank ('') keywords. This also changed how blank keywords are represented--there are still exactly 8 spaces before any commentary content can begin; this may affect the exact display of header cards that assumed there could be fewer spaces in a blank keyword card before the content begins. However, the current approach is more in line with the requirements of the FITS standard. Corresponds to PyFITS ticket 194.
• astropy.io.votable
  • The Table class now maintains a single array object which is a Numpy masked array. For variable-length columns, the object that is stored there is also a Numpy masked array.
  • Changed the pedantic configuration option to be False by default due to the vast proliferation of non-compliant VO Tables. [#296]
  • Renamed astropy.io.vo to astropy.io.votable.
• astropy.table
  • Added a workaround for an upstream bug in Numpy 1.6.2 that could cause a maximum recursion depth RuntimeError when printing table rows. [#341]
• astropy.wcs
  • Updated to wcslib 4.15 [#418]
  • Fixed a problem with handling FITS headers on locales that do not use dot as a decimal separator. This required an upstream fix to wcslib which is included in wcslib 4.14. [#313]
• Fixed some tests that could fail due to missing/incorrect logging configuration--ensures that tests don't have any impact on the default log location or contents. [#291]
• Various minor documentation fixes [#293 and others]
• Fixed a bug where running the tests with the py.test command still tried to replace the system-installed pytest with the one bundled with Astropy. [#454]
• Improved multiprocessing compatibility for file downloads. [#615]
• Fixed handling of Cython modules when building from a source checkout of a tagged release version. [#594]
• Added a workaround for a bug in Sphinx that could occur when using the :tocdepth: directive. [#595]
• Minor VOTable fixes [#596]
• Fixed how setup.py uses distribute_setup.py to prevent possible VersionConflict errors when an older version of distribute is already installed on the user's system. [#616][#640]
• Changed use of log.warn in the logging module to log.warning since the former is deprecated. [#624]

0.1 (2012-06-19)

• Initial release.